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CARLYLE 



VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES 



PUBLISHED AND IN PREPARATION 



EDITED BY WILL D. HOWE 



Carlyle, . 

Browning, 

Hawthorne, 

Emerson, 

Wordsworth, 

Byron, 

Dickens, . 

Whitman, 

Defoe, 

Lowell, . 



By Bliss Perry 

By William Lyon Phelps 

By George E. Woodberry 

By Samuel McChord Crothers 

By C. T. Winchester 

By Paul Elmer More 

By Richard Burton 

By Brand Whitlock 

By William P. Trent 

By John H. Finley 



Etc., Etc 




Thomas Carlyle 



THOMAS CARLYLE 

HOW TO KNOW HIM 



By 
BLISS PERRY 

A ui/ior of 

A Study of Prose Fiction, The Amateur Spirit 
Walt Whitman, Etc^ Etc. 



WITH PORTRAIT 



EQ 



INDIANAPOLIS 

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



COPYRiGHT 1915 

The Bobbs-Merrill Company 





1 



?!>r 



preS9'OF 

braunworth & co. 

bookbinders and printers 

brooklyn. n. y. 



SEP 23 1915 



CI.A41061 



PRELIMINARY 

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish peasant who be- 
came one of the great names of English literature. 
The story of that transformation and achievement has 
been told and retold by many a brilliant writer during 
the generation which has elapsed since Carlyle's death. 

No record of personal development and literary ac- 
complishment is more fascinating. Yet it is not the aim 
of this book to present one more biography of Car- 
lyle. It is rather to exhibit, as far as possible in Car- 
lyle's own words, the working of his mind. His books 
are intensely, supremely personal. They review his 
own struggles, his slowly-won mastery over himself 
and his circumstances, his entire theory of human 
life and conduct. With a vividness almost if not 
quite unrivalled in the whole history of literature, 
they describe his ancestry and early environment, his 
unsystematic education, his painful quest of a career, 
and the spiritual conflicts by which he came to an 
ultimate command of himself. This main battle once 
won, he perfected, between the ages of thirty and thir- 
ty-five, his theory of biography and history. It re- 
mained essentially unchanged throughout the rest of 
his long life. His epoch-making histories — The 
French Revolution, CromivelVs Letters and Speeches, 
and Frederick the Great — are the endeavors of an ex- 
traordinary literary artist to adjust this theory to 



PRELIMINARY 

the facts of a vanished European society. His social 
and political writings — like Chartism, Past and Pres- 
ent, and Latter-Day Pamphlets — apply his theory, as 
a surgeon applies his knife and caustic, to the ills 
of the England of his day. Carlyle the critic of books, 
Carlyle the biographer and historian of great men and 
great events, Carlyle the prophet and mystic, are thus 
essentially and radically one. To disbelieve this mes- 
sage or "gospel" of Carlyle is quite within the rights 
of any contemporary reader, but there is no longer 
any excuse for misunderstanding it. The present 
book is merely a fresh attempt to let Carlyle explain 
himself and his views, as adequately as the inexorable 
count of pages will permit. We must allow this 
prince of talkers to do almost all the talking; but be- 
fore he begins we must say a word about his Scotch 

accent — the rich accent of Annandale. 

B.P. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER ^^^^ 

I The Heritage 1 

II The Making of the Man .... 8 

III Babylon 17 



IV Solitude 



24 



V The Reaction ^^ 

VI Our Own Problem 36 

VII How He Wrote ^0 

i VIII His Literary Theory .... 60 

^ IX The Theory Tested 68 

- X Sartor Resartus 89 

XI The French Revolution .... 121 

XII Chartism 1^2 

XIII Heroes and Hero-Worship ... 170 

XIV Past and Present 1^5 

XV Cromwell ^^^ 

XVI Latter-Day Pamphlets .... 223 

XVII The Life of John Sterling ... 230 

XVIII Frederick THE Great 241 

Index 26S 



CARLYLE 



CARLYLE 



CHAPTER I 

THE HERITAGE 

TRAMPING into Ecclefechan one bright Au- 
gust morning with the village postman, I re- 
marked that most books about Carlyle gave the 
impression that he was born in a dreary and unat- 
tractive place. 

" 'Tis the sweetest spot in all Dumfriesshire," 
said the postman loyally; and indeed it was sweet 
enough, — a fine rolling country, with rich wood- 
lands and yellowing grain, and bright streams foam- 
ing down to the Solway. The straggling village, a 
Border town sixteen miles beyond Carlisle, on the 
Great North Road from London to Glasgow, has 
changed but little since Thomas Carlyle first opened 
his eyes in the upper chamber of the stone-arch 
house in 1795. Jhe tiny stream still flows through 



2 CARLYLE 

the village street. A few rods from the house where 
Carlyle was born is the churchyard where he was 
buried, on that grim winter day of 1881. The care- 
taker of the "arch-house" will show you the relics, 
and confess that all that she and the other village 
children knew about Carlyle, in the height of his 
fame, was that an old man was wont to visit Eccle- 
fechan every summer and that the children would 
say : "I see old Tom Caerl is back." The guardian 
of the churchyard, an old woman, shrugs her shoul- 
ders at your comment upon the neglect of the grave. 
"I expect they'll be saving the money," is her Scotch 
explanation; and the ghost of the dead man gives, 
very possibly, an ironic chuckle. 

The whole country-side is full of ghosts, indeed, 
to the lover of Carlyle. Six miles to the south of 
Ecclefechan, on the Sol way, lies Annan, — whither 
the little fellow trudged off to school in 1806, his 
father by his side. To the northeast and north lie 
the farms of Scotsbrig and Mainhill. Farther to- 
ward the northeast is Dumfries, and beyond Dum- 
fries, on the moors, are Templand and Craigen- 
puttoch. The unlucky reader to whom, as yet, 
these names are only names, should steep himself 
>vithout delay in Carlyle's Reminiscences, and par- 



THE HERITAGE 3 

ticularly in the first chapter, written in the week 
after his father's death in 1832. There is the un- 
forgetable portrait of James Carlyle, stone-mason, 
descended from a line of Borderers: — "pithy, bit- 
ter-speaking bodies and awfu' fighters/* — himself 
an austere man with deep inner springs of tender- 
ness, who taught his gifted son the power of phrase 
and the gospel of work. "It was he exclusively that 
determined on educating me; that from his small 
hard-earned funds sent me to school and college and 
made me whatever I am or may become. . . . 
He was a man of perhaps the very largest natural 
endowment of any it has been my lot to converse 
with. None of us will forget that bold glowing 
style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, 
full of metaphors (though he knew not what a meta- 
phor was) with all manner of potent words which 
he appropriated and applied with a surprising ac- 
curacy you often would not guess whence — brief, 
energetic, and which I should say conveyed the most 
perfect picture, definite, clear, not in ambitious 
colours but in full white sunlight, of all the dialects 
I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hear 
him undertake to render visible which did not be- 
come almost ocularly so. Never shall we again heai; 



4 CARLYLE 

such speech as that was. The whole district knew of 
it and laughed joyfully over it, not knowing how 
otherwise to express the feeling it gave them; em- 
phatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger 
he had no need of oaths, his words were like sharp 
arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault 
was that he exaggerated (which tendency I also in- 
herit ), yet only in description and for the sake chiefly 
of humourous effect. He was a man of rigid, even 
scrupulous veracity. I have often heard him turn 
back when he thought his strong words were mis- 
leading, and correct them into mensurative accuracy. 
. . . This great maxim of philosophy he had gath- 
ered by the teaching of nature alone — ^that man 
was created to work — ^not to speculate, or feel, or 
dream. Accordingly he set his whole heart thither- 
wards. He did work wisely and unweariedly ( Ohm 
Hast aber ohne Rast) and perhaps performed more 
with the tools he had than any man I now know. 
It should have made me sadder than it did to hear 
the young ones sometimes complaining of his slow 
punctuality and thoroughness. He would leave 
nothing till it was done. . . . On the whole ought 
I not to rejoice that God was pleased to give me 
such a father; that from earliest years I had the 



THE HERITAGE 5 

example of a real Man of God*s own making con- 
tinually before me? Let me learn of /tiw. Let me 
write my books as he built his houses, and walk as 
blamelessly through this shadow world; if God so 
will, to rejoin him at last. Amen." 

Of Carlyle's mother, Margaret Aitken, the stone- 
mason's second wife, there is no full-length descrip- 
tion in the Reminiscences, but from the family let- 
ters it is easy to perceive what manner of person she 
was, — an affectionate, yearning, solicitous woman, 
loyal like all the Carlyle clan, and unspeakably 
proud of Tom. She learned painfully to write, in 
middle age, so that she might correspond with 
him; she tried to understand his books, and surely 
when, with his literary glory fairly won, son and 
mother sat smoking pipes together on her doorstep 
in the late-lingering Scottish twilights, she under- 
stood him and was happy. One and all, and until 
the very end of their long lives, the Carlyles were 
bound together by a fierce and sweet family affec- 
tion. Thomas and John, the two educated sons, put 
money in their purses at last, but even when they 
were poorest, some shillings out of every hard- 
won pound went freely to the less fortunate of the 
clan. 



6 CARLYLE 

Their religious heritage was Dissent. James Car- 
lyle belonged to the sect of Burgher-Seceders, or 
"New Lichts." "A man who awoke to the belief 
that he actually had a soul to be saved or lost was 
apt to be found among the Dissenting people, and 
to have given up attendance on the Kirk," says 
Thomas. "Very remarkable are those old Seceder 
clergy to me now when I look back on them. Most 
of the chief figures among them in Irving's time and 
mine were hoary old men; men so like what one 
might call antique Evangelists in ruder vesture and 
'poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ,' I have no- 
where met with in monasteries or churches, among 
Protestant or Papal clergy, in any country of the 
>vorld." It was among these gray heads in the 
Ecclefechan meeting-house — "that poor temple of 
my childhood" — that Carlyle first learned that sa- 
cred lesson of Reverence which he afterward dis- 
covered in Wilhelm Meister, The wish and inten- 
tion of his father and mother was that he should fit 
himself for the ministry. It was with this aim that 
the minister of the meeting-house first taught him 
Latin, as a preparation for Annan grammar school 
and the University of Edinburgh. This dream of 
a consecrated calling faded slowly, to his father's 



THE HERITAGE 7, 

silent bewilderment and his mother^s keen sorrow, 
but Carlyle never lost his sense of dedication to the 
highest things. He remained to the end, like Emer- 
son, but far more deeply than Emerson, a child of 
Calvinism, rejecting its formulas^ but faithful to 
its mandates to the soul. 

The law of Carlyle's childhood, then, was the 
old rule of poverty, chastity and obedience; of fam- 
ily love and loyalty ; the hard, narrow and vital ex- 
perience of a country-bred boy; and the provincial, 
racial stamp of the Scottish Border, with its rude 
face and its inner flashing pride. 



CHAPTER II 

THE MAKING OF THE MAN 

THE authentic facts as to Carlyle's education 
are found in the Reminiscences — particularly 
in the chapter on Irving — and in his Early Letters, 
He came but slowly and painfully to the finding of 
himself and his true path. The two years at Annan 
were wretched. The four years at Edinburgh, from 
his fifteenth to his nineteenth year, were not unlike 
the experience of most Scottish youth of his period. 
His satirical picture of the University in Sartor Re- 
sartus does scant justice to his own teachers, who 
were reputable, though not highly distinguished 
scholars. He was well nourished upon farm sup- 
plies from Ecclefechan, and he had no real troubles 
except "growing pains." He made warm friend- 
ships. His Latin and French were good, and his 
mathematics brilliant ; he learned little or no Greek, 
and art and science remained — as always— a sealed 
book to him. After four winters as "student in 

8 



lThe making of the man 9 

5irts," he left Edinburgh, without a degree, but en- 
rolled as a student of divinity, with the duty of 
making an annual report of progress and handing 
in an essay. He had won the appointment of math- 
ematical tutor in his old school, Annan Academy. 
Two discontented years here were followed by two 
years of private tutoring at Kirkcaldy, where Irving 
lent him books. He now abandoned the prepara- 
tion for the ministry, and ended by taking private 
pupils in Edinburgh for four years more, — ^mean- 
while reading law a little, studying mineralogy, mas- 
tering German, and writing some hack articles for 
Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopedia. 

He was "drifting" in these years, much as Thack- 
eray, Tennyson and Walt Whitman drifted in their 
turn, until they found their bearings. Carlyle found 
his, toward the end of his Edinburgh tutoring, in the 
famous Leith Walk "Conversion," recorded in the 
"Everlasting No" chapter of Sartor Resartus. He 
had denied, in that moment of fierce insight, that the 
Devil — {'der Geisf der stets verneinf) the Great 
Denier, ruled his soul; and henceforward he was a 
free man. A tutorship in the Buller family ( 1822- 
1824) left him leisure for enormous reading, chiefly 
in German literature, and for writing his first book, 



10 CARLYLE 

the Life of Schiller. He visited London, where his 
friend Irving had become a fashionable preacher. 
He made a brief, but to him most valuable, trip to 
Paris. At a farm-house on Haddon Hill near his 
father's new farm at Mainhill, in the summer of 
1825, he had the experience recorded in the "Ever- 
lasting Yea*' chapter of Sartor Resartus, — the ec- 
static moment of acceptance of the universe as God's 
world. 

"I lived very silent, diligent, had long solitary 
rides (on my wild Irish horse Larry, good for 
the dietetic part), my meditatings, musings, and re- 
flectings were continual ; my thoughts went wander- 
ing (or travelling) through eternity, through time, 
and through space, so far as poor I had scanned or 
known, and were now to my endless solacement 
coming back with tidings to me ! This year I found 
that I had conquered all my scepticisms, agonising 
doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile 
and soul-murdering Mud-gods of my epoch; had 
escaped as from a worse than Tartarus, with all its 
Phlegethons and Stygian quagmires, and was emerg- 
ing free in spirit into the eternal blue of the ether, 
where, blessed be heaven! I have for the spiritual 
part ever since lived, looking down upon the welter- 



lThe making of the man 11 

ings of my poor fellow-mortals, in such multitudes 
and millions still stuck in that fatal element, and 
have had no concern whatever in their Puseyisms, 
ritualisms, metaphysical controversies and cob- 
webberies, and no feeling of my own except honest 
silent pity for the serious or religious part of them, 
and occasional indignation, for the poor world's 
sake, at the frivolous secular and impious part, w;ith 
their universal suffrages, their Nigger emancipa- 
tions, sluggard and scoundrel Protection societies, 
and 'unexampled prosperities' for the time being! 
.What my pious joy and gratitude then was, let the 
pious soul figure. In a fine and veritable sense, I, 
poor, obscure, without outlook, almost without 
worldly hope, had become independent of the world. 
What was death itself, from the world, to what I 
had come through? I understood well what the old 
Christian people meant by conversion, by God's in- 
finite mercy to them. I had, in effect, gained an im- 
mense victory, and for a number of years had, in 
spite of nerves and chagrins, a constant inward hap- 
piness that was quite royal and supreme, in which 
all temporal evil was transient and insignificant, and 
which essentially remains with me still, though far 
oftener eclipsed and lying deeper down than then. 



12 CARLYLE 

Once more, thank Heaven for its highest gift. I 
then felt, and still feel, endlessly indebted to Goethe 
in the business. He, in his fashion, I perceived, 
had travelled the steep rocky road before me, the 
first of the moderns." . . . 

He had already begun to correspond with Goethe. 
But there is another series of letters, far more sig- 
nificant even than the Goethe correspondence, in 
revealing the character of the young Carlyle. In 
May, 1821, he had been introduced by Irving to 
Miss Jane Welsh of Haddington, and had promptly 
fallen in love with this brilliant and ambitious girl. 
The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane 
Welsh are among the most veracious and illuminat- 
ing documents of the crucial period of Carlyle's life. 
His unselfishness of spirit, wide-ranging play of in- 
tellect, and nobleness of aspiration, are revealed 
throughout. No wonder that she wrote to a woman 
friend, when all the occasional misunderstandings 
and reluctances of her engagement drew to a close : 
'*He possesses all the qualities I deem essential in my 
Husband, a warm true heart to love me, a towering 
intellect to command me, and a spirit of fire to be 
the guiding star of my life." ... 

They were married in 1826, and after two win- 



p:he making of the man 13 

ters in Edinburgh, where Carlyle was occupied witK 
writing articles for the Reviews, they removed to 
the Welshes farm-house by Craigenputtoch — the 
"Hill of the Hawks" — on the moorland north of 
Dumfries. 

In the six solitary years at Craigenputtoch — 1828 
to 183^1 — broken indeed by long visits to London 
and Edinburgh — Carlyle grew to his full mental 
stature. 

Mrs. Carlyle, always delicate in health, profited 
by the keen moorland air and the long rides on 
horseback. Housekeeping, in that remote district, 
brought its natural trials, but occasionally they had 
charming guests, like Jeffrey and Emerson, ("our 
quiet night of clear fine talk") , and they enjoyed un- 
burdened leisure for reading and writing. "We had 
trouble with servants, with many paltry elements 
and objects, and were very poor ; but I do not think 
our days were sad, and certainly not hers in especial, 
but mine rather. We read together at night, one 
>vinter, through *Don Quixote* in the original; 
Tasso in ditto had come before; but that did not 
last very long. I was diligently writing and read- 
ing there; wrote most of the 'Miscellanies' there, 
for Foreign, Edinburgh, etc., Reviews (obliged to 



14 CARLYLE 

keep several strings to my bow), and took serious 
thought about every part of every one of them. 
After finishing an article, we used to get on horse- 
back, or mount into our soft old rig, and drive away, 
either to her mother's (Tempi and, fourteen miles 
off), or to my father and mother's (Scotsbrig, 
seven or six-and-thirty miles) ; the pleasantest jour- 
neys I ever made, and the pleasantest visits. Stay 
perhaps three days; hardly ever more than four; 
then back to work and silence . . . We were not 
unhappy at Craigenputtoch ; perhaps these were our 
happiest days. Useful, continual labour, essentially 
successful; that makes even the moor green. I 
found I could do fully twice as much work in a 
given time there, as with my best effort was possible 
in London, such the interruptions, etc. Once, in the 
winter time, I remember counting that for three 
months, there had not been any stranger, not even 
a beggar, called at Craigenputtoch door." 

The intellectual results of the Craigenputtoch 
period were threefold. Here Carlyle brought to an 
end his critical studies of German literature, devel- 
oped his own theory of biography and history 
(which was also capable of being turned into a 
theory of conduct), and made in Count Cagliostro^ 



JHE MAKING OF THE MAN 15 

and The 'Diamond Necklace his preparatory studies 
for The French Revolution. Sartor Resartus, which 
was completed in 1831, precisely midway in the 
Craigenputtoch epoch, has been described as a moun- 
tain pool draining the great upland of German lit- 
erature. But it is also a personal document of the 
highest significance in revealing the manner of man 
Carlyle had become. "It was the best I had in me," 
he said stoically when the three London publishers, 
Fraser, Longman and Murray, had in turn rejected 
the manuscript, and Carlyle had tied it up and laid 
it away in a box. "I did my best," and Craigen- 
puttoch had likewise done its best for him, and he 
had to choose between going on to London and its 
fuller life, or remaining a mere provincial figure. 
The German studies, continued now for ten years, 
had taught him many things. He had become the 
foremost British authority in that field, and though 
he never completed his outlined History of German 
Literature, nor even began his projected Life of 
Luther — for him a far better subject than Fred' 
erick — ^his critical essays upon Schiller and Goethe, 
Novalis and Richter, and the other German philoso- 
phers and poets have remained one of the enduring 
treasures of our own literature. Slowly he turned 



16 CARLYLE 

from eighteenth century Germany to eighteenth 
century France — a more natural field for a Scotch- 
man, since the Scottish type of education had been, 
since the days of Queen Mary, largely French, — 
and revealed in his essays upon Diderot and Voltaire 
an astonishing familiarity with the ways of the Old 
Regime. But his "trial flights'* as a story-teller of 
the Pre-Revolutionary epoch taught him that the 
books essential for a history of the Revolution itself 
were not then accessible in Scotland; and thus this 
road, too, led to London. 

But the valuable literary lesson of the Craigen- 
puttoch exile, after all, is as clearly written in Car- 
lyle's essays on Burns and Johnson, and on History 
and Biography, as it is in any of his studies of 
European events or European figures. This lesson, 
.which we must presently examine in his own words, 
is the cardinal point of his creed as an historian 
and biographer: namely, that all art of portrayal 
depends upon preliminary imaginative insight, and 
that the secret of insight is sympathy. To find your 
man, to love him, then to paint him as he is : this is 
the law — Carlyle thought — for all truly creative 
>vork in biography and history. London, in 1834, 
yras slow to believe it. 



CHAPTER III 



BABYLON 



NO private house in London is so well known 
to Americans as 24 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 
where Carlyle lived from 1834 until his death in 
1881. "Chelsea," he wrote his wife, who had re- 
mained in Scotland while he was househunting, 
**is a singular heterogeneous kind of a spot, very 
dirty and confused in some places, quite beautiful in 
others, abounding with antiquities and the traces of 
great men — Sir Thomas More, Steele, Smollett, etc. 
Our row, which for the last three doors or so is a 
street, and none of the noblest, runs out upon a 
Tarade' (perhaps they call it) running along the 
shore of the river, a broad highway with large shady 
trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of shipping 
and tan." A letter to his mother is no less pic- 
turesque : "We lie safe at a bend of the river, away 
from all the great roads, have air and quiet hardly 
inferior to Craigenputtoch, an outlook from the 

17 



18 CARLYLE 

back windows into mere leafy regions with here and 
there a red high-peaked old roof looking through; 
and see nothing of London, except by day the sum- 
mits of St. PauFs Cathedral and Westminster Ab- 
bey, and by night the gleam of the great Babylon 
affronting the peaceful skies. The house itself is 
probably the best we have ever lived in — a right old, 
strong, roomy brick house, built near one hundred 
fifty years ago, and likely to see three races of these 
modern fashionables fall before it comes down." 

This brick house, — now a Carlyle museum, rich 
in relics and in memories, — sheltered as strange and 
brilliant a man and woman as were to be found in 
London. Carlyle was now thirty-nine: noticeably 
tall, with touzled black hair, wonderful violet-blue 
eyes, and the fresh red cheeks of a peasant. His 
:wife was six years younger: a fascinating, self- 
willed creature, endowed with brains, beauty and a 
tongue. Like her husband, she suffered from 
chronic dyspepsia; like him, she was proud, sensi^ 
tive, affectionate in a Spartan fashion, and a fiery 
Scot. They were both aliens in London, as the 
Scotch have ever been; and they conquered their 
London in due time, as the Scotch are wont to do. 
Finely loyal to each other in all essential ways, there 



BABYLON IS! 

was in each an overlying vein of hardness, more 
pronounced in the wife than in the husband. The 
tenderness which each felt often remained unuttered. 
"Only think of my husband having given me a little 
present!" Mrs. Carlyle wrote in 1842; "he who 
never attends to such nonsense as birthdays. . . . 
I can not tell you how wae his little gift made me, 
as well as glad; it was the first thing of the kind he 
ever gave me in his life. In great matters he is al- 
ways kind and considerate ; but these little attentions, 
which we women attach so much importance to, he 
was never in the habit of rendering to any one; his 
up-bringing, and the severe turn of mind he has 
from nature, had alike indisposed him toward them." 
Their marriage was, to their disappointment, child- 
less. 

As the years of fierce intellectual labor went 
by, Carlyle grew increasingly preoccupied with his 
tasks; though he did not realize how completely 
they had absorbed him until the tragic clearness of 
self-examination, in the solitary years following his 
wife's death, revealed his error when it was too late. 
Mrs. Carlyle had her own circle of friends and ad- 
mirers, and though she renounced — no doubt with 
jvisdom — ^the literary ambitions which had dom- 



20 CARLYLE 

inated her girlhood, she led her own intellectual 
life, with sympathies and antipathies which her hus- 
band did not share. To think, however, of their 
marriage as an unhappy one, is to do it less than 
justice. Neither the husband nor the wife was of a 
"happy" temperament; both were nervous invalids, 
thin-skinned and unreasonable and equipped with 
biting tongues; but, all things considered, it would 
have been difficult to discover in all London a better 
mate for either of them. Tennyson's robust com- 
mon-sense judgment has often been quoted : "Mr. 
and Mrs. Carlyle on the whole enjoyed life together, 
else they would not have chaffed one another so 
heartily." 

The story of Carlyle's life in London has been 
told with consummate art by Froude, and far more 
briefly and with greater justice by Richard Garnett. 
As a record of the production of books, it is a tale 
of triumph after triumph. It will be remembered 
that Carlyle's only writings, up to 1834, had been 
the Life of Schiller, some translations from the Ger- 
man, — of which Goethe's Wilhelm Meister was the 
most significant, — reviews and articles and essays, 
and Sartor Resartus, which had been printed as a 



BABYLON 21 

serial in Fraser's, but which no publisher had the 
courage to issue as a book. His first task in Lon- 
don, attempted with the encouragement and help of 
John Stuart Mill, was The History of the French 
Revolution. This astounding performance, whose 
method and technique must be the subject of later 
comment, was published in 1837. It marked Car- 
lyle, at once, as one of the greatest writers of his 
epoch. Sartor Resartus, first printed in book form 
in Boston in 1836, under Emerson's supervision, 
was now reissued in London (1838), and it was 
followed in the next year by a collection of Critical 
and Miscellaneous Essays in four volumes. Then 
came Chartism, and the brilliant London lectures on 
Heroes and Hero-Worship, delivered to notable au- 
diences in 1840, and printed, after revision, in 1841. 
Carlyle was already busy with one of his most 
gigantic tasks, a life of Cromwell, which ultimately 
restricted itself to an annotated edition of Crom- 
well's Letters and Speeches, published in 1845. He 
had paused, in a kind of rage over the social condi- 
tions of England, two years before, to paint the 
contrasting pictures of Past and Present. In 1850 
came the furious Latter-Day Pamphlets denouncing 
the age in which he lived; yet in 1851 this was fol- 



22 CARLYLE 

lowed by one of Carlyle*s most quiet and per fecit per- 
formances in pure literature, The Life of Sterling. 
Five or six years earlier than this, he had begun to 
read in preparation for the last and most difficult 
of his Herculean labors, The History of Frederick 
the Great. The first two volumes appeared in 1858. 
The last page of the sixth and final volume was writ- 
ten in January, 1865. "Sunday night, January 5, 
1865, went out to post-office with my last leaf of 
'Frederick' MS. Evening still vivid to me. I was 
not joyful of mood; sad rather, mournfully thank- 
ful, but indeed half killed, and utterly wearing out 
and sinking into stupefied collapse after my 'coma- 
tose' eflforts to continue the long flight of thirteen 
years to finis. On her face, too, when I went out, 
there was a silent, faint, and pathetic smile, which 
I well felt at the moment, and better now ! Often 
enough had it cut me to the heart to think what she 
was suffering by this book, in which she had no 
share, no interest, nor any word at all; and with 
what noble and perfect constancy of silence she 
bore it all. My own heroic little woman !" 

It was in the following spring of 1866 that Car- 
lyle, now a tired old man of seventy-one, elected 



BABYLON 23 

Lord Rector of his own University of Edinburgh by 
a large majority over his opponent Disraeli, deliv- 
ered his last public utterance, the noble and touch- 
ing Edinburgh Address. It was a day of bound- 
less triumph, won among his own people; but before 
he could return to London he was stricken with the 
tidings of Mrs. Carlyle's sudden death. She had 
never been more proud of him nor more fond of him 
than in that high moment. "It seems so long," she 
wrote in her last letter, "since you went away." 

"By the calamity of April last," Carlyle wrote to 
Emerson in the following January, "I lost my little 
all in this world; and have no soul left who can 
make any corner of this world into a home for me 
any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble 
was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully 
accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings ; 
and I am forever poor without her. She was 
snatched from me in a moment, — as by a death from 
the gods. Very beautiful her death was; radiantly 
beautiful (to those who understood it) had all her 
life been : quid plura? I should be among the dull- 
est and stupidest, if I were not among the saddest of 
all men. But not a word more on all this." 



CHAPTER IV 



SOLITUDE 



CARLYLE survived his wife fifteen years: a 
solitary, broken figure of a man, familiar to 
the world in Whistler^s portrait. But the truth is 
that he had always been solitary in spirit : "infinitely 
solitary," as he had written to Emerson in 1852. 
Emerson's tests of capacity for friendship, it may 
be remembered, were truth, tenderness, and the 
ability to do without friendship. Carlyle possessed 
these qualifications to a singular degree. His rough 
sincerity, his deep wells of tenderness, his passionate 
family affection, characterize him from first to last. 
He seems to have had no warm friends in childhood, 
but he won them in college, and held them through- 
out the long years when he was seeking his true 
career. His friendliness of disposition is proved by 
his correspondence with Irving, Emerson, Sterling 
and Mill; and by his intercourse with his London 
neighbors like the Hunts and the Gilchrists. He 

24 



SOLITUDE 2S 

had admiring acquaintances in every walk of life : 
aristocrats like Milnes and the Ashburtons, Radicals 
like the Bullers, Mazzini and John Forster, church- 
men like Thirlwall and Wilberforce, men of science 
like Tyndall and Huxley, men of letters like Tenny- 
son, Fitzgerald, Browning, Thackeray, Ruskin, Nor- 
ton, counted themselves among his intimates. But 
they all knew well enough that in the recesses of his 
soul he dwelt apart. It was his nature, and he was 
incapable of change. More than most men, he had 
a sense of what Swift called the transiency and 
vanity of all earthly things. With Andrew Marvell 
he could say : 

"At my back I always hear 

Time's winged chariot hurrying near.** 

He wrote in his Journal for 1854 : "Time ! Death ! 
All-devouring Time! This thought ^Exeunt om- 
nes/ and how the generations are like crops of 
grass, temporary, very, and all vanishes, as it were 
an apparition and a ghost : these things, though half 
a century old in me, possess my mind as they never 
did before." Many of Carlyle's sublimest passages 
in Sartor and elsewhere, sound this note of trans- 
iency: "Time's winged chariot hurrying near," 
perceived by the supersensitive ear of a solitary. 



26 CARLYLE 

His literary work was essentially done, when the 
final loneliness began in 1866. It lasted until his 
death in 1881. In the first shock of his bereavement 
he spent his days in meditation upon the happiness 
that had been so close to him while he had been too 
often unaware of it. With meditation there was 
swiftly mingled a passionate regret for all his blind- 
ness to the little things that make up the sum of a 
woman's happiness, and he reproached himself bit- 
terly, now that it was too late. He set himself to 
the mournful task of writing a memoir of his wife, 
and then of annotating her letters, in heart-broken 
phrases which reveal all his old literary power, but 
which were tempered by no restraint. This memoir, 
and the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Car- 
lyle, prepared in tragic expiation of a guilt of blind- 
ness which few persons would have been cruel 
enough to impute to him, became after his death, 
and through the deliberate choice of his executor, 
Froude, a scourge to Carlyle's memory. 

In all outward ways, the old man's closi;ig years 
were tranquil. The income from his books had 
long been larger than the frugal life of Chelsea de- 
manded, leaving a generous margin for charities. 
His niece Mary Aitken, afterward Mrs. Alexander 



SOLITUDE 27 

Carlyle, kept House for him. The stream of dis- 
ciples and friends still flowed without cessation to- 
3vard Cheyne Row. Germany conferred upon him 
the splendid order Pour le Merite, founded by his 
hero Frederick, and Queen Victoria, through her 
premier Disraeli, offered him the Grand Cross of 
the Bath. His eightieth birthday, in 1875, was com- 
memorated by a gold medal and an address signed 
by more than one hundred of the foremost names in 
Great Britain. Slowly he lost strength, thereafter, 
though his spirit did not pass until February 5, 
1881. It had been known for weeks that he was 
dying, and the words that Walt Whitman wrote in 
his Camden diary will remind some Americans of 
their own emotions in that hour : 

"... In the fine cold night, unusually clear, 
(February 5, '81) as I walked some open grounds 
adjacent, the condition of Carlyle, and his approach- 
ing — perhaps even then actual — death, filled me with 
thoughts eluding statement, and curiously blending 
with the scene. The planet Venus, an hour high 
in the west, with all her volume and lustre re- 
covered, (she has been shorn and languid for nearly 
a year,) including an additional sentiment I never 
noticed before — not merely voluptuous, Paphian, 



28 CARLYLE 

steeping, fascinating— now with calm commanding 
seriousness and hauteur — the Milo Venus now. Up- 
ward to the zenith, Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon 
past her quarter, trailing in procession, with the 
Pleiades following, and the constellation Taurus, 
and rjfd Aldebaran. Not a cloud in heaven. Orion 
strode through the southeast, with his glittering 
belt — and a trifle below hung the sun of the night, 
Sirius. Every star dilated, more vitreous, nearer 
than usual. Not as in some clear nights when the 
larger stars entirely outshine the rest. Every little 
star or cluster just as distinctly visible, and just as 
nigh. Berenice's hair showing every gem, and new 
ones. To the northeast and north the Sickle, the 
Goat and kids, Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, and 
the two Dippers. While through the whole of this 
silent indescribable show, inclosing and bathing my 
whole receptivity, ran the thought of Carlyle dying. 
'(To soothe and spiritualize, and, as far as may be, 
solve the mysteries of death and genius, consider 
them under the stars at midnight.) 

"And now that he has gone hence, can it be that 
Thomas Carlyle, soon to chemically dissolve in ashes 
and by winds, remains an identity still? In ways 
perhaps eluding all the statements, lore and specula- 



SOLITUDE 29 

tlons of ten thousand years — eluding all possible 
statements to mortal sense — does he yet exist, a 
definite, vital being, a spirit, an individual — ^perhaps 
now wafted in space among those stellar systems, 
which, suggestive and limitless as they are, merely 
edge more limitless, far more suggestive systems? 
I have no doubt of it. In silence, of a fine night, 
such questions are answer'd to the soul, the best 
answers that can be given. With me, too, when de- 
pressed by some specially sad event, or tearing prob- 
lem, I wait till I go out under the stars for the 
last voiceless satisfaction." 

Carlyle was buried in Ecclefechan on that "cold 
dreary February morning" so touchingly described 
by Froude. 



CHAPTER V 



THE REACTION 



SOON the storm of detraction broke. The 
blame for it lies fairly on the shoulders of 
James Anthony Froude, Carlyle's friend and lit- 
erary executor. But Froude^si action was not so 
much a betrayal of a trust — as has been bitterly 
asseverated — as it was an error of judgment : error 
in reading the characters of b)oth Mr. and Mrs. Car- 
lyle, error in interpreting Carlyle's wishes, error 
in artistic presentation of the outstanding features 
of his personality. 

The facts must be briefly stated here. Carlyle's 
original executors were his brother, Doctor John 
Carlyle, the Dante scholar, and John Forster. After 
Forster's death, Froude's name was substituted for 
his, in 1878. John Carlyle died in 1879, two years 
before his brother. In 1881, then, Froude had the 
responsibility of deciding what manuscript remains 
of Thomas Carlyle should be published. Jen years 

30 



THE REACTION 31 

earlier Carlyle had placed in Froude's hands a col- 
lection of manuscripts, including the memoir of 
Mrs. Carlyle written immediately after her death, 
memoirs of Irving and Jeffrey, notes upon 
Wordsworth and Southey, and a sketch of Carlyle's 
father written after his death in 1832. This ma- 
terial Froude decided to issue as Carlyle's Rem- 
iniscences. He stated clearly in the preface that 
"perhaps most of it was not intended for publica- 
tion." But he did not print the solemn injunction 
which Carlyle had written at the end of the manu- 
script volume: "I still mainly mean to burn this 
book before my own departure, but feel that I shall 
always have a kind of grudge to do it, and an in- 
dolent excuse, 'Not yet; wait, any day that can be 
done !' and then it is possible the thing may be left 
behind me, legible to interested survivors — friends 
only. I will hope, and with worthy curiosity, not 
unworthy! In which event, I solemnly forbid them, 
each and all, to publish this bit of writing as it 
stands here; and warn them that without fit editing 
no part of it should be printed (nor so far as I can 
order shall ever be) ; and that the editing of per- 
haps nine-tenths of it will, after I am gone, have 
become impossible. T. C, 28 July, 1866" 



32 CARLYLE 

Froude's omission of this postscript was a grave 
error of judgment, as it proved, although he un- 
questionably supposed that Carlyle had changed his 
mind about the matter, and that Carlyle's verbal 
directions to him, authorizing him to use his dis- 
cretion, when the manuscripts were given to his 
keeping in 1871, superseded the postscript of 1866. 
To have stated this with frankness, would have been 
Froude's wiser course. But he could not have an- 
ticipated the violence of the criticism provoked by 
the publication of these intimate records of Car- 
lyle*s impressions of his contemporaries. It is likely 
that Carlyle himself never recognized how blistering 
his own words were. In private talk his extreme 
expressions were often accompanied by a hearty hu- 
morous laugh at his own extravagance of speech, 
and the laugh corrected and humanized the total im- 
pression made upon his hearers. But now, in 1881, 
the readers of the Reminiscences could not hear the 
dead man's delighted chuckle at his hyperboles ; they 
felt the harshness, the vindictiveness of Carlyle's 
attitude toward many honored names, and they 
blamed Froude for these improprieties. The pain- 
ful impression as to Carlyle's true nature was in- 
creased by Froude*s publication of The Letters ani 



THE REACTION 33 

Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, prepared, as we 
have seen, in the husband's agony of sorrow and 
contrition, and surely not intended by him to be 
given unrevised to the eye of the great public. These 
books were soon accompanied by Froude's massive 
Life of Carlyle, in four volumes : a superb and en- 
during monument to his hero, and nevertheless a 
biography whose immediate and obvious influence 
was to emphasize certain flaws in Carlyle's char- 
acter. 

In the light of facts subsequently revealed, it is 
now certain that Froude's admiration for Mrs. Car- 
lyle and his chivalrous desire to present her as a 
woman "misunderstood" — even by her husband — •■ 
led him into exaggeration. He overestimated her 
sacrifice "of ambition and fortune" in marrying 
him, Jane Welsh did not possess the social station, 
nor the property, and it is fairly clear that she did 
not possess the original intellectual force, which 
Froude attributed to her. What was far more 
sinister than this, he magnified her very natural 
jealousy of Carlyle's friendship for the first Lady 
Ashburton in such a way as to make many readers 
of the biography imagine that Carlyle was guilty, 
not merely of wilful cruelty leading to estrange- 



34 CARLYLE 

ment, but of actual infidelity. AH this seems ab- 
surd enough now, but the immediate result was to 
deal Carlyle's personal character a blow from which 
it was not easy to recover. Was not Froude a close 
friend, the possessor of thousands of letters and 
other manuscript documents, and was he not among 
the most eminent of historians, skilled in collecting 
and weighing evidence? The most loyal of Car- 
lyle's admirers felt a sinking of the heart. 

Very slowly the scales of public opinion began to 
turn. The Alexander Carlyles, greatly offended by 
Froude's methods, regained possession of the orig- 
inal manuscripts utilized by the literary executor. 
Charles Eliot Norton now had access to them, and 
in a vigorous article in the New Princeton Review 
(July, 1886) exposed Froude's characteristic care- 
lessness and inaccuracy in dealing with manuscript 
sources, particularly with regard to the Reminis- 
cences. Norton also edited Carlyle's correspondence 
with Emerson and with Goethe, and his early let- 
ters. Here was evidence as to Carlyle's real nature, 
not to be gainsaid. Then, twenty years after the 
first storm, appeared a series of volumes which 
cleared the air. In 1903 Mr. Alexander Carlyle 
printed the New^ Letters and Memorials of Jane, 



THE REACTION 35 

Welsh Carlyle, with an introduction by Sir James 
Crichton-Browne, setting forth Froude's defects as 
a biographer. Froude replied in his My Relations 
with Carlyle (1903). Crichton-Browne made a re- 
joinder in The Nemesis of Froude ( 1903), to which 
Froude, who died in 1904, did not reply. In that 
year Alexander Carlyle issued the New Letters of 
Thomas Carlyle, and in 1909 The Love Letters of 
Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, The complete 
facts were at last made manifest, and Froude's bril- 
liant and somewhat misleading "Life" of his hero 
stands corrected at the points where the unwary 
reader needed to be put upon his guard. Save for 
these defects arising from partiality of vision and 
artistic exaggeration, Froude's masterly perform- 
ances will not be superseded. 



CHAPTER VI 



OUR OWN PROBLEM 



IT REMAINS to be said that a new generation of 
readers must find its own methods of approach 
to Carlyle. None of the great Victorian writers 
like Thackeray, Dickens, Newman, Ruskin, can be 
read by an American in the second decade of the 
twentieth century as they were read by their con- 
temporaries. No vividness of historical imagination 
can transport us completely backward into that by- 
gone epoch. Its literary, social and ethical atmos- 
phere can not be reproduced. Much of the present 
reaction against the Early and Middle Victorians is 
stupid : it is what Doctor Johnson would call "pure 
ignorance." But some of it is the result of in- 
evitable social change. Even during the forty years 
of Carlyle' s living activity in the world of letters, 
there were profound alterations in the structure of 
English thought and in the conditions of English 
society. In 1832 he stood, or thought he stood, by 

36 



OUR OWN PROBLEM 37. 

the side of John Stuart Mill, the Radical; but they 
parted forever over the question of American 
slavery, and Carlyle stood frankly, in the eighteen- 
sixties, for the program of the "beneficent whip." 
This cost him the allegiance of many American ad- 
mirers, and his tardy admission, after the close of 
the Civil War, that he might have been mistaken as 
to its real issue, left his general attitude toward 
democracy and liberty unchanged. He distrusted 
both. Anticipating Ruskin in his advocacy of pop- 
ular education and of many social and administra- 
tive reforms, Carlyle would nevertheless be as dis- 
gruntled by the program of contemporary British 
Liberalism as he was by the Liberalism of the 
eighteen- forties. He would dislike no less the for- 
ward movements of contemporary thought in the 
United States. What then are we to search for in 
the twenty-five volumes of this typical mid- Victo- 
rian, most of whose work was finished — and by 
many, even then, thought antiquated — more than 
half a century ago ? What go we out again into this 
wilderness to see? 

Well, we shall see first of all a literary artist, a 
master of word and phrase. An eccentric, a "bar- 
barian," a gesticulator, a lover of the extravagant 



38 CARLYLE 

and the grotesque, Carlyle was nevertheless one of 
the most cunning and effective workmen who have 
.wrought in the medium of human speech. He knew; 
precisely what he was doing, and he liked to ex- 
pound the secrets of his profession. As realist, hu- 
morist, portrait painter and story-teller, his place 
is with the very greatest of men of letters, and he 
won that place by understanding himself and his 
task, and by following what was, for him, precisely 
the right method. To watch this artist at his work 
is to learn something of the immutable laws of 
literature. 

It may well be granted that Carlyle' s eye and hand 
are marvellous, but how about his mind? What 
are his leading ideas ? What is the ethical validity 
of his famous gospels of "work" and of "sincerity" ? 
What is the philosophical value of his mysticism, 
of the transcendental significance which he gives 
to the terms "silence" and "nature of things" ? What 
shall be said to-day of his political views, his theory 
of the "hero," his diagnosis of the "condition of 
England," and the social remedies which he pro- 
poses? Has he trust in progress, in the education 
of the race? Does he believe that a democracy de- 
velops leadership or promotes fellowship? With 



OUR OWN PROBLEM 39 

the word "faith" so often upon his eloquent lips, 
has he himself a living faith in man and in God, and 
m the co-operation of man with God? 

It is the problem of this book to answer these 
questions if possible, and to answer them as far as 
possible in Carlyle's own words. The task will jus- 
tify itself as we proceed, and perhaps there is no 
need of foreshadowing the result in this preliminary 
chapter. Yet there would be little excuse for an- 
other book about Carlyle if it were not fairly cer- 
tain, at the outset, that we are dealing with a writer 
who perceived in an extraordinary way, the worth 
of the individual man, and who had an overwhelm- 
ing sense of the infinite background of human life; 
and who therefore, in spite of his pessimism, became 
a seer and a prophet of idealism. 



CHAPTER VII 



HOW HE WROTE 



CARLYLE'S marvellous faculty for expres- 
sion was the result of mental qualities which 
made the facile prose composition of many profes- 
sional writers impossible to him. He had to toil 
over each one of his tasks, as if he were writing a 
book for the first time, and almost as if he were 
writing for the first time in English. Like a Cana- 
dian wood-chopper, he grunted with each stroke of 
the ax; but if there was a grunt with every stroke, 
there was also a stroke for every grunt. His im- 
patient or despairing exclamations give picturesque- 
ness to his letters; his daily task on his Cromwell 
becomes, in the Carlylese vocabulary, "a real descent 
to Hades, to Golgotha and Chaos!" But he never 
stopped chopping for all that. 

A few of his comments upon his French Revolu- 
tiofij as the work progressed, illuminate the truly 
artistic instinct of this toiler, who usually had only 

40 



HOW HE WROTE 41 

iWorHs of scorn for "Art." Before attempting to 
portray the Revolution itself, he had tried his hand, 
it will be remembered, at The Diamond Necklace, 
in order "to prove myself in the narrative style." 
One would say to-day that the proof was tolerably 
clear ! Yet he thought his own style, in this period, 
"far from the right;" The Diamond Necklace "is 
very far from pleasing me." He began writing The 
French Revolution in September, 1834, "with a kind 
of trembling hope," but after two weeks of labor 
he had produced but two pages of copy, and even 
these, "alas ! not in the right style, not in the style 
that can stand." After a few months he reports 
that his book is proceeding "dreadfully slowly" but 
is "otherwise better than anything that I have done." 
The burning of the manuscript, through the care- 
lessness of John Stuart Mill's maid, destroyed the 
result of five months' labor; but it was character- 
istic of the indomitable Scotchman that he straight- 
>vay purchased a better quality of writing paper, 
and after a week's holiday, set himself to the task of 
making a better book. But the style still gave him 
"great uneasiness" : it seemed to him full of affecta- 
tion. He writes on nevertheless, "with the force 
of fire, above all with the speed of fire." "Nor do 



42 CARLYLE 

I mean to investigate much more about it," he writes 
to his wife in 1836, "but to splash down what I 
know, in large masses of colours; that it may look 
like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance, 
1 — ^which it is." How well this canny Scot knew 
>vrhat he was doing, after all ! "It is a wild savage 
Book," he wrote to Sterling when it was finished; 
"born in blackness, whirlwind and sorrow." "One 
of the savagest written for several centuries," he 
said to his brother John ; and then he added coolly 
and shrewdly, in his next letter: "It will stand a 
great deal of beating; the critics are welcome to lay 
on; there is a kind of Orson life in it which they 
will not kill." Pleasantest of all is his quiet sentence 
to his mother in September, 1837: "They make a 
great talk about the Book ; which seems to have suc- 
ceeded in a far higher degree than I had looked 
for." 

Carlyle's attitude toward his task is equally clear 
in his comments upon the annotation of CromweWs 
Letters and Speeches. Here are a few sentences from 
his correspondence with Emerson (the italics are 
Carlyle's) : 

"I know no method of much consequence, except 
that of believing, of being sincere; from Homer and 



HOW HE WROTE 43 

the Bible down to the poorest Burns's song, I find 
no other art which promises to be perennial. 

"I grow daily to honor Facts more and more, and 
Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems to me, is a 
great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then 
at least by the Devil. 

"I have often thought of Cromwell and Puritans; 
but do not see how the subject can be presented 
still alive. A subject dead is not worth presenting. 

"I am now over head and ears in Cromwellian 
books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my 
life, to see if it be possible to get any creditable 
face-to-face acquaintance with our English Puritan 
period; or whether it must be left forever a mere 
hearsay and echo to one. Books equal in dulness 
were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted 
man. Nevertheless, courage! I have got, within 
the last twelve months, actually as it were, to see 
that Cromwell was one of the greatest souls born of 
the English Kin; a great amorphous semi-articulate 
Baresark; very interesting to me. I grope in the 
dark vacuity of Baxters, Neales; thankful for here 
a glimpse, there a glimpse. 

*T had begun to write some book on Cromwell. 
. . . There is risk yet, that with the loss of still 



44 CARLYLE 

farther labour, I may have to abandon It; and 
then the great dumb Oliver may lie unspoken for- 
ever; gathered to the mighty Silent of the earth; 
for, I think, there will hardly ever live another man 
that will believe in him and his Puritanism as I do. 
Xo him small matter. 

"You ask after Cromwell: ask not of him; he is 
like to drive me mad. There he lies, shining clear 
enough to me, nay glowing, or painfully burning; 
but far down; sunk under the hundred years of Cant, 
Oblivion, Unbelief, and Triviality of every kind; 
through all which, and to the top of all which, what 
mortal industry or energy will avail to raise him! 
A thousand times I have rued that my poor activity 
ever took that direction. The likelihood still is that 
I may abandon the task undone. . . . There is 
no use of writing of things past, unless they can be 
made in fact things present." 

In all these passages Carlyle emphasizes an intense 
vision of the Fact, and intense belief in it, as the 
cardinal laws of historical writing. Generally speak- 
ing, he had a contempt for all formal methods of 
literary composition. Froude quotes a character- 
istic utterance : 

"Of Dramatic Art, though I have eagerly listened 



HOW HE WROTE 45 

to a Goethe speaking of it, and to several hundreds 
of others mumbling and trying to speak of it, I find 
that I, practically speaking, know yet almost as good 
as nothing. Indeed, of Art generally {Kunst, so 
called), I can almost know nothing. My first and 
last secret of Kunst is to get a thorough intelligence 
of the fact to be painted, represented, or, in what 
ever way, set forth — the fact deep as Hades, high as 
heaven, and written so, as to the visual face of it on 
our poor earth. This once blazing within me, if it 
will ever get to blaze, and bursting to be out, one 
has to take the whole dexterity of adaptation ona 
is master of, and with tremendous struggling, con- 
trive to exhibit it, one way or the other. This is 
not Art. I know well. It is Robinson Crusoe, and 
not the master of Woolwich, building a ship. Yet 
at bottom is there any Woolwich builder for such 
kinds of craft? What Kunst had Homer? What 
Kunst had Shakespeare ? Patient, docile, valiant in- 
telligence, conscious and unconscious, gathered from 
all winds, of these two things — their own faculty 
of utterance, and the audience they had to utter to, 
rude theater, Ithacan Farm Hall, or whatever it 
was — add only to which as the soul of the whole, 
the above-said blazing, radiant insight into the fact. 



46 CARLYLE 

blazing, burning interest about it, and we have the 
whole Art of Shakespeare and Homer." 

It should be added that in the composition of 
Cromwell, and of The French Revolution, Carlyle 
>vas unable, through the very defects of his extra- 
ordinary qualities, to avail himself of conventional 
methods of note-taking; he had to carry his notes 
"in the living mind," however great might be the 
strain of the constantly focused attention. He 
wrote to the Reverend Alexander Scott in 1845 : 

"You ask me how I proceed in taking notes on 
such occasions. I would very gladly tell you all my 
methods if I had any; but really I have as it were 
none. I go into the business with all the intelligence, 
patience, silence, and other gifts and virtues that I 
have ; find that ten or a hundred times as many could 
be profitably expended there, and still prove insuffi- 
cient : and as for plan, I find that every new business; 
requires as it were a new scheme of operations, 
which amid infinite bungling and plunging unfolds 
itself at intervals (very scantily after all) as I get 
along. The great thing is. Not to stop and break 
down ; to know that virtue is very indispensable, that 
one must not stop because new and ever new drafts 
upon one's virtue must be honoured ! But as to the 



HOW HE WROTE 47 

special point of taking Excerpts, I think I univer- 
sally, from habit or otherwise, rather avoid writing 
beyond the very minimum; mark in pencil the very 
smallest indication that will direct me to the thing 
again ; and on the whole try to keep the whole mat- 
ter simmering in the living mind and memory rather 
than laid up in paper bundles or otherwise laid up 
in the inert way. For this certainly turns out to be 
a truth : Only what you at last have living in your 
own memory and heart is worth putting down to 
be printed; this alone has much chance to get into 
the living heart and memory of other men. And 
here indeed, I believe, is the essence of all the rules 
I have ever been able to devise for myself. I have 
tried various schemes of arrangement and artificial 
helps to remembrance ; paper-bags with labels, little 
paper-books, paper-bundles, etc., etc.; but the use 
of such things, I take it, depends on the habits and 
humours of the individual; what can be recom- 
mended universally seems to me mainly the above. 
My paper-bags (filled with little scraps all in pencil) 
have often enough come to little for me; and indeed 
in general when writing, 1 am surrounded with a 
rubbish of papers that have come to little : — this only 
will come to much for all of us, — To keep the thing 



48 CARLYLE 

you are elaborating as much as possible actually in 
your living mind; in order that this same mind, as 
much awake as possible, may have a chance to make 
something of it ! — ^And so I will shut up my lumber 
shop again; and wish you right good speed in 
yours." 

When this letter was written, Carlyle had already 
begun to read in preparation for his Frederick the 
Great, although many years were to pass before he 
actually began writing. Again we listen to the per- 
perpetual groanings that accompany his steady toil : 
he has no "sufficient love for lean Frederick and his 
heroisms"; he faces "by far the heaviest job ever 
laid upon me" ; "I make no way in my Prussian his- 
tory"; he has no "motive to go on, except the sad 
negative one, 'Shall we be beaten in our old days 
then?' " Of course he did make his way, in spite of 
impatience and disillusionment, and he was not 
beaten, because it was not in his nature to be beaten. 
But from his first book to his last, the inner strug- 
gle and the confessions of it remained much the 
same. There was always the agonizing effort to 
"see" the "fact," to penetrate to its real significance, 
to "believe" in its validity; and then to express the 



HOW HE WROTE 49 

fact "sincerely," vividly, audibly, — as it were with 
the speaking voice. 

In sheer visualizing power Carlyle surpassed any 
of his contemporaries, except possibly Dickens. 
Often of course, he had to set himself consciously 
to work to reconstruct a vanished scene. When, 
for instance, he visited the ancient battlefield of 
Dunbar in September, 1843, he wrote to his wife: 
"Having time to spare (for dinner was at six), I 
surveyed the old Castle, washed my feet in the sea, 
— smoking the while — took an image of Dunbar 
with me as I could, and then set my face to the wind 
and the storm." He "takes" the image, it will be 
observed, precisely as a photographer might "take" 
a picture, except that Carlyle is really looking at 
the swift confused masses of charging men, dead 
two hundred years before. 

Another phrase, illuminating the dramatic, dyna- 
mic quality of Carlyle's visualization, occurs in his 
essay on Diderot : "As to this Diderot, had we once 
got so far that we could, in the faintest degree, per- 
sonate him; take upon ourselves his character and 
his environment of circumstances, and act his Life 
over again, in that small Private Theater of ours 



'50 CARLYLE 

(under our Hat), — that were what, in conformity 
with common speech, we should name understanding 
him, and could be abundantly content with." 

The two passages just quoted are concerned with 
conscious professional effort to "see" the object 
imaginatively. But there are hundreds of pen-por- 
traits in Carlyle's published works which seem to 
have resulted from the mere unconscious exposure 
of a highly sensitized retina: Carlyle sees and re- 
members and describes, as it were automatically. 

"At the corner of Cockspur Street we paused for 
a moment, meeting Sir John Sinclair (Statistical 
Account of Scotland, etc.), whom I had never seen 
before and never saw again. A lean old man, tall 
but stooping, in tartan cloak, face very wrinkly, 
nose blue, physiognomy vague and with distinction 
as one might have expected it to be." 

His single picture-making epithets are famous. 
"Lion" Mirabeau, "sea-green" Robespierre, "Grand- 
ison-Cromwell" Lafayette are familiar examples. 
But his nick-naming skill is matched by his ability 
to hit off a character with a volley of unexpected 
adjectives. "Jemmy Belcher was a smirking little 
dumpy Unitarian bookseller." "Coleridge, a 
puffy, anxious, obstructed-looking, fattish old man." 



HOW HE WROTE 51 

The student of Carlyle's craftsmanship can not 
spend a few days more profitably than in collecting 
for himself such examples of Carlyle's instantaneous 
photography. He should notice how the portraits 
etched with a line or two compare in technique and 
in effectiveness with the half-length and full-length 
figures which crowd the Carlyle gallery. 

Here is Southey, described in a single sentence 
for the benefit of Emerson : 

"Southey's complexion is still healthy mahogany- 
brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that 
seem running at full gallop." 

Three years earlier, in 1835, Carlyle had entered 
this fuller description of Southey in his diary : 

"A lean, grey, whiteheaded man of dusky com- 
plexion, unexpectedly tall when he rises and still 
leaner then — the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed 
Roman nose, small carelined brow, huge bush of 
white grey hair on high crown and projecting on all 
sides, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes 
I have ever seen — a well-read, honest, limited 
(straight-laced even), kindly-hearted, most irritable 
man." 

Thirty-two years later, Carlyle sketched Southey 
once more, in his Reminiscences: 



52 CARLYLE 

"Southey was a man towards well up in the fifties ; 
hair grey, not yet hoary, well setting off his fine 
clear brown complexion ; head and face both small- 
ish, as indeed the figure was while seated ; features 
finely cut; eyes, brow, mouth, good in their kind- 
expressive all, even vehemently so, but betokening 
rather keenness than depth either of intellect or 
character; a serious, human, honest, but sharp, al- 
most fierce-looking thin man, with very much of the 
militant in his aspect, — in the eyes especially was 
visible a mixture of sorrow and of anger, or of 
angry contempt, as if his indignant fight with the 
world had not yet ended in victory, but also never 
should in defeat." 

Here are two portraits of Alfred Tennyson, 
drawn in the eighteen- forties : 

"One of the finest-looking men in the world. A 
great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laugh- 
ing hazel eyes ; massive aquiline face, most massive 
yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, al- 
most Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free- 
and-easy; — smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is 
musical metallic, — fit for loud laughter and piercing 
>vail, and all that may lie between; speech and 



HOW HE WROTE 53 

speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in 
these late decades, such company over a pipe ! — We 
shall see what he will grow to." 

"A fine, large- featured, dim-eyed, bronze-col- 
oured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred ; dusty, smoky, 
free and easy, who swims outwardly and inwardly 
with great composure in an inarticulate element of 
tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke. Great now and 
then when he does emerge — a most restful, broth- 
erly, solid-hearted man." 

The picture of DeQuincey, in the Reminiscences, 
is unforgetable : 

"He was a pretty little creature, full of wire- 
drawn ingenuities, bankrupt enthusiasms, bankrupt 
pride, with the finest silver-toned low voice, and 
most elaborate gently winding courtesies and in- 
genuities in conversation. 'What wouldn't one give 
to have him in a box, and take him out to talk!' 
That was Her criticism of him, and it was right 
good. A bright, ready, and melodious talker, but 
in the end an inclusive and long-winded. One of 
the smallest man figures I ever saw; shaped like a 
pair of tongs, and hardly above five feet in all. When 
he sate, you would have taken him, by candlelight. 



54 CARLYLE 

for the beauti fullest little child; blue-eyed, spark- 
ling face, had there not been a something, too, which 
said 'Eccovi — this child has been in hell' '* 

Here is another proof of Carlyle's possession of 
the detective's eyesight and memory. In visiting the 
Model Prison described in one of The Latter-Day 
Pamphlets he recognized a man whom he had seen 
once on the street a year before : 

*Trom an upper room or gallery, we looked down 
into a range of private courts, where certain Char- 
tist Notabilities were undergoing their term. Char- 
tist Notability First struck me very much; I had 
seen him about a year before, by involuntary acci- 
dent and much to my disgust, magnetizing a silly 
young person; and had noted well the unlovely 
voracious look of him, his thick oily skin, his heavy 
dull-burning eyes, his greedy mouth, the dusky po- 
tent insatiable animalism that looked out of every 
feature of him: a fellow adequate to animal-mag- 
netize most things, I did suppose; — and here was 
the post I now found him arrived at." 

For a final example of Carlyle's descriptive power 
let us turn from the world of men to the world of 
apes, and read this parable from Past and Present: 

"Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology 



HOW HE WROTE 55 

are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses 
and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men 
dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; 
and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, 
the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the 
falsities and semblances of it, were fallen into sad 
conditions, — verging indeed toward a certain far 
deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven 
to send them the Prophet Moses, with an instructive 
word of warning, out of which might have sprung 
'remedial measures' not a few. But no : the men of 
the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet-species always 
does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses ; 
listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grin- 
ning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting 
even to yawn; and signified in short, that they 
found him a humbug and even a bore. Such was 
the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake 
formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he 
was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. 

"Moses, withdrew ; but Nature and her rigorous 
veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead 
Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all 
'changed into Apes'; sitting on the trees there, 
grinning now in the most wnaff ected manner ; gibber- 



56 CARLYLE 

ing and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding 
the whole Universe now a most indisputable Hum- 
bug. The Universe has become a Humbug to these 
Apes who thought it one. There they sit and chat- 
ter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath 
there returns to them a bewildered half -conscious- 
ness, half-reminiscence ; and they sit, with their 
wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of 
supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out 
through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, 
into the wonder fulest universal smoky Twilight and 
undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things; wholly 
an Uncertainty, Unintelliglbllity, they and It; and 
for commentary thereon, here and there an unmu- 
sical chatter or mew : — truest, tragicalest Humbug 
conceivable by the mind of man or ape ! They made 
no use of their souls ; and so have lost them. Their 
worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with 
unmusical screeches, and half remember that they 
had souls. 

"Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall in with par- 
ties of this tribe? Meseems they are grown some- 
what numerous in our day." 

To print examples of Carlyle's manner of writing 
is no doubt easier than to explain how he came to 



HOW HE WROTE 57, 

write as he did. Yet certain extracts of his work- 
manship are plainly to be accounted for. The oral 
characteristics of his style, its exaggeration and its 
humor, are in part an inheritance and imitation of 
his father's talk in Annandale. Richter and other 
German romanticists encouraged him, no doubt, in 
a restless wilfulness, a dislike of the beaten paths. 
But his choice of words and sentence-structure, like 
his whole method of composition, was really necessi- 
tated by his physical organization. He exhibited, 
in an extraordinary degree, a combination of what 
are known as the "visual," the "audile" and the 
"motor" types of imagination. H his sensitiveness 
to visual impressions resembles that of Dickens, as 
we have said, in his nervous response to stimuli of 
sound he is like Walt Whitman, and in his motor 
type of imaginative energy he is another Tolstoi. 
Artists of this motor type think with their whole 
body. Their nerve centers compel them, whether 
they will or no, to a perpetual dynamic activity. 
They can not help creating a "Private Theater un- 
der their own Hat" and turning actors in it. They 
write in terms of bodily sensation. 

An illustration may make this clearer. One of 
my pupils once marked four hundred and thirty-two 



58 CARLYLE 

passages in Carlyle's French Revolution as being 
"striking." When he was asked to analyse these 
passages and to discover, if possible, the reason for 
the impression they had made upon him, he found 
that nineteen per cent, of them — nearly one passage 
in every five — contained images of fire. Sixteen per 
cent, had images founded upon discordant noises, 
sixteen per cent., also, contained color terms, fif- 
teen per cent, presented images of storm, wind and 
other violent physical changes in Nature, eleven per 
cent, had terms of confusion and chaos, and nearly 
eight per cent, were marked by metaphors drawn 
from the animal world. It may be added that thirty- 
five per cent, of the four hundred and thirty-two 
passages contained the "triad" construction — a 
three- fold grouping of words, clauses or sentences, 
familiar in the Bible and in many classical writers. 
Of course it should be remembered that this par- 
ticular pupil, in marking passages which appealed 
to him, betrayed, no doubt, something of his own 
type of physical organization and his own imagina- 
tive response to verbal imagery. It should also be 
borne in mind that Carlyle produced, especially in 
his letters and early essays, hundreds of pages 
which were not composed in the heightened "Car- 



HOW HE WROTE 59 

lylese" manner, and which are not easily to be dis- 
tinguished, save by experts in EngHsh style, from 
other good writing of the Victorian period. Yet it 
remains true that he will continue to be judged as a 
writer by the passages which bear most intimately 
the mark of his temperament. At once a realist 
and a mystic, he was forced by the laws of his na- 
ture to see things in a certain way, and having per- 
ceived this vision, he had no rest in his soul or body 
until he had told what he had seen. 



CHAPTER VIII 



HIS LITERARY THEORY 



CARLYLE'S method — instinctive and acquired 
— can be understood more easily if it is 
studied in connection with certain passages of his 
early critical essays, and with the theory of biog- 
raphy and history which he had evolved, long be- 
fore he had attempted the great books which gave 
him fame. 

It will be remembered that Carlyle began to study 
German in 1819, and that for a decade thereafter 
he busied himself chiefly with German literature. 
One of the results of his German studies was a 
quickening of his critical faculties, particularly in 
relation to the question of the nature of literature 
itself. In his Life of Schiller, his translations of 
German Romance, and above all in his translation 
of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the young Scotchman 
was compelled to grapple with some of the funda- 
mental questions concerning poetry and prose. 

60 



HIS LITERARY THEORY 61 

His conception of the mood of the typical poet 
and of the function of genius was deeply influenced 
by Schiller. Though he came later, like so many 
other men, to discover that Goethe was greater than 
Schiller, — a "Bishop" in the diocese where Schiller 
remained merely a high-minded "Priest," — Schiller*s 
unconditional idealism became Carlyle's. In Rich- 
ter he found "something splendid, wonderful, dar- 
ing" ; and his clear-cut portrayal of the singularities 
of Richter's style proves that Carlyle himself imi- 
tated Richter with his eyes wide open, — if he may 
fairly be said to have imitated him at all. Richter, 
said Carlyle, "in adopting his own extraordinary 
style, did it with clear knowledge of what excellence 
in style, and the various kinds and degrees of ex- 
cellence therein, properly signified." In closing a 
remarkable essay on The State of German Litera- 
ture Carlyle confesses that the spiritual aspect of 
Europe is melancholy, deserted of religious light: 
and yet he asserts that religion and poetry are eter- 
nal in the soul of man. 

In the essay on Novalis he frankly adopts the 
philosophy and the terminology of Transcendental- ^ 
ism: to Novalis "Nature is no longer dead hostile ^ 
Matter, but the veil and mysterious garment of the ' 



62 CARLYLE 

unseen." This doctrine was to become later the 
key-note of unforgetable passages in Sartor Re- 
sarins. Carlyle admits that Novalis was a Mystic, 
but he goes on to assert that "the Plummet of 
French or Scotch logic . . . will not sound the 
deep-seas of human Inquiry." Many a page was 
Carlyle destined to compose upon that theme ! 

But the notable essay on Goethe {Foreign Re- 
view, 1828), written four years after Carlyle's per- 
sonal correspondence with the Olympian had begun, 
and four years before Goethe's death, affords the 
clearest demonstration of what Carlyle had learned 
from the master. Carlyle presents Goethe as "a 
clear and universal man." His "poetry is no separate 
faculty, no mental handicraft; but the voice of the 
whole harmonious manhood." There is embodied in 
Goethe "the Wisdom which is proper to this time; 
the beautiful, the religious Wisdom, which may 
still, with something of its old impressiveness, speak 
to the whole soul; still, in these hard, unbelieving 
days, reveal to us glimpses of the Unseen but not 
Unreal World, that so the Actual and the Ideal may 
again meet together, and clear Knowledge be again 
wedded to Religion, in the life and business of men." 
Goethe's poetry is thus "the poetry of our own day 



HIS LITERARY THEORY 63 

and generation. No demands are made on our 
credulity; the light, the science, the scepticism of 
our age, is not hid from us. . . . Poetry, as he 
views it, exists not in time or place, but in the spirit 
of man." The Poetry written by the Masters 
"aims not at 'furnishing a languid mind with fan- 
tastic shows and indolent emotions,* but at incor- 
porating the everlasting Reason of man in forms 
visible to his Sense, and suitable to it." 

This belief in the reality of Poetry, and in its 
high and enduring significance to man, was an es- 
sential article of Carlyle's literary creed. To pro- 
duce literature worthy of the name one must con- 
form to those conditions which are requisite for the 
production of poetry. One must possess a pene- 
trating vision into facts and into those spiritual 
causes which lie back of facts; and one must be 
capable of that transforming imaginative power 
which incorporates the everlasting Reason into 
forms visible to the senses. 

He gave a classic expression of this conviction 
in a passage of the lecture on The Hero as Poet: 

"Nevertheless, you will say, there must be a dif- 
ference between true Poetry and true Speech not 
poetical: what is the difference? On this point 



64 CARLYLE 

many things have been written, especially by late 
German Critics, some of which are not very in- 
telligible at first. They say, for example, that the 
Poet has an infinitude in him; communicates an 
Unendlichkeif, a certain character of 'infinitude,* 
to whatsoever he delineates. This, though not very 
precise, yet on so vague a matter is worth remem- 
bering: if well meditated, some meaning will grad- 
ually be found in it. For my own part, I find con- 
siderable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of 
Poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a 
song. Truly, if pressed to give a definition, one 
might say this as soon as anything else: If your 
delineation be authentically musical, musical not in 
word only, but in heart and substance, in all thoughts 
and utterances of it, in the whole conception of it, 
then it will be poetical ; if not, not. — Musical : how 
much lies in that ! A musical thought is one spoken 
by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart 
of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, 
namely the melody that lies hidden in it ; the inward 
harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it 
exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All 
inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally 



HIS LITERARY THEORY 65 

utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song 
goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can 
express the effect music has on us? A kind of in- 
articulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to 
the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for the moment 
gaze into that! 

"Nay all speech, even the commonest speech, has 
something of the song in it: not a parish in the 
world but has its parish-accent ; — the r3^hm or tune 
to which the people sing what they have to say ! Ac- 
cent is a kind of chanting; all men have accent of 
their own, — though they only notice that of others. 
Observe too how all passionate language does of 
itself become musical, — with a finer music than mere 
accent; the speech of a man in zealous anger be- 
comes a chant, a song. All deep things are Song. 
It seems somehow the very central essence of us. 
Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings and 
hulls! The primal element of us; of us and of all 
things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: 
it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of 
Nature ; that the soul of all her voices and utterances 
was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call 
mtisical Thought, The Poet is he who thinks in 



e(i CARLYLE 

that manner. At bottom, it turns still on power of 
intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision 
that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you 
see musically; the heart of Nature heing everywhere 
music, if you can only reach it." 

As for the mere "art" of writing in verse, or for 
that matter in prose, Carlyle, as we have seen, 
troubled himself but little. If he could once see his 
facts "blazing," and was sure of their spiritual sig- 
nificance, the outward dress of words became to him 
a negligible detail. This was a dangerous laxity 
upon his part, no doubt; but his extraordinary na- 
tive gift for expression made him reckless of all 
theories of style. But in his theory of the function 
of the imagination he is at one with most of the 
great creative artists who have tried to communi- 
cate in words their sense of the significant in art. 

The particular form of literary art which Car- 
lyle chose to follow led him straight to the fields of 
history and biography, and it happened that while 
he was writing some of his most memorable his- 
torical and biographical sketches, he also ventured 
to set forth his views as to the essential nature of the 
task which he had undertaken. A brief examina- 



HIS LITERARY THEORY 67 

tion of his theory and practise, just before and after 
the Sartor Resartus period, will show the inner con- 
sistency of his method, — a method which may be 
traced in every one of his subsequent books. 



CHAPTER IX 



THE THEORY TESTED 



IET US select, then, a half dozen essays written 
^by Carlyle during the years immediately pre- 
ceding and following the writing of Sartor Resartus 
in 1831. In these review articles, no one of which 
seems to have made a very profound impression at 
the moment, there will be found a summary of the 
working ideas which were soon to win for Carlyle 
his distinctive place in the world of letters. 

Perhaps the best known essay of the group is 
the Edinburgh Review article on Burns (1828). 
Written ostensibly as a notice of Lockhart's Life of 
Burns, it passes without much delay to a funda- 
mental discussion of the aim of Biography. Car- 
lyle insists that if a man's life be written at all, "the 
public ought to be made acquainted with all the in- 
ward springs and relations of his character. Ho\/ 
did coexisting circumstances modify him from with- 
out; how did he modify these from within? With 

68 



THE THEORY TESTED 69 

what endeavors and what efficacy rule over them; 
with what resistance and what suffering sink under 
them? In one word, what and how produced was 
the effect of society on him; what and how pro- 
duced was his effect on society? He who should 
answer these questions, in regard to any individual, 
would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection 
in Biography." He then proceeds to a sympathetic 
sketch of a poet in a prosaic age. The excellence of 
Burns lay in his "Sincerity, his indisputable air of 
Truth" He sees his object. His love and his in- 
dignation are genuine. The Jolly Beggars is thus 
the most strictly poetical of Burns's "poems;" it is 
"complete, a real self-supporting Whole;" but the 
same wholeness, and an even truer inspiration is to 
be found in his Songs. Burns failed, it is true, in 
two indisputable matters : he had no Religion, and 
he had no singleness of aim. Yet the world is 
habitually unjust in its judgments of such men as 
Burns and Byron. "Granted the ship comes into 
harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged ; the pilot 
is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all- 
powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us 
first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, 
or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs." 



70 CARLYLE 

The sternness and tenderness and rich eloquence 
of this essay make it the most familiar example of 
what is sometimes termed Carlyle's "first manner." 
It is written in conformity with the best English 
eighteenth century style, only with more freedom 
and warmth and depth of coloring. Yet its im- 
portance is not as a pattern of writing, but in its 
typical Carlylese attitude toward the deep problems 
of life and literature. 

The essay on History (1830) shows the same 
intimate sense of the difficulties in reaching an ade- 
quate judgment upon either the individual or the col- 
lective life. "Let any one who has examined the cur- 
rent of human affairs, and how intricate, perplexed, 
unfathomable, even when seen into with our own 
eyes, are their thousand- fold blending movements, 
say whether the true representing of it is easy or 
impossible. Social Life is the aggregate of all the 
individual men's Lives who constitute society; His- 
tory is the essence of innumerable Biographies. But 
if one Biography, nay our own Biography, study 
and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many 
points unintelligible to us; how much more must 
these million, the very facts of which, to say noth- 



THE THEORY TESTED 71 

ing of the purport of them, we know not, and can 
not know !" 

How rare, Carlyle goes on to argue, is the faculty 
of insight into passing things ! How much has been 
"passed over unnoticed, because no Seer, but only 
mere Onlookers, chanced to be there!'' It is only 
the Seers who have a chance to become the true 
Artists in History, as distinguished from the artizans 
and mere recorders. 

In the essay on Biography {Fraser^s Magazine, 
April, 1832) Carlyle uses again his axiom : "History 
is the essence of innumerable Biographies." Biog- 
raphy combines ^oeti£ and scientific interest. Imag- 
inative picture, for instance, is essentially bio- 
graphic ; and for all true biographic writing there is 
needed a Poet, — that is to say, not a verse-writer, 
but a man who can perceive and set forth the inex-' 
haustible meanings of Reality. Here we reach the 
central point of Carlyle's theory: according to him 
all Reality, every Fact, is full of these inexhaustible 
meanings, waiting to be interpreted. Hence the in- 
finite worth of Truth, the omnipotence of Belief. 
^ If Truth and Belief are there, how impressive be- 
comes the smallest historical fact ! And then come 



72 CARLYLE 

the marvellous pages in which Carlyle illustrates 
his creed : 

". . . We ourselves can remember reading, in 
Lord Clarendon, with feelings perhaps somehow 
accidentally opened to it, — certainly with a depth of 
impression strange to us then and now, — that insig- 
nificant-looking passage, where Charles, after the 
battle of Worcester, glides down, with Squire Care- 
less, from the Royal Oak, at nightfall, being hungry : 
how, 'making a shift to get over hedges and ditches, 
after walking at least eight or nine miles, which 
were the more grievous to the King by the weight 
of his boots (for he could not put them off when he 
cut off his hair, for want of shoes), before morning 
they came to a poor cottage, the owner whereof, 
being a Roman Catholic, was known to Careless/ 
How this poor drudge, being knocked up from his 
snoring, 'carried them into a little barn full of hay, 
which was a better lodging than he had for himself* ; 
and by and by, not without difficulty, brought his 
Majesty *a piece of bread and a great pot of butter- 
milk,' saying candidly that *he himself lived by his 
daily labor, and that what he had brought him was 
the fare he and his wife had' : on which nourishing 
diet his Majesty, 'staying upon the hay-mow,' feeds 



THE THEORY TESTED 73 

thankfully for two days; and then departs, under 
new guidance, having first changed clothes, down to 
the very shirt and 'old pair of shoes,' with his land- 
lord ; and so, as worthy Bunyan has it, 'goes on his 
way and sees him no more/ Singular enough, if 
we will think of it! This, then, was a genuine 
flesh-and-blood Rustic of the year 1651 : he did ac- 
tually swallow bread and buttermilk (not having 
ale and bacon), and do field-labor: with these hob- 
nailed 'shoes* has sprawled through mud-roads in 
winter, and, jocund or not, driven his team a-field in 
summer: he made bargains; had chaff erings and 
higglings, now a sore heart, now a glad one; was 
born ; was a son ; was a father ; toiled in many ways, 
being forced to it, till the strength was all worn out 
of him; and then — lay down 'to rest his galled back,' 
and sleep there till the long-distant morning ! How; 
comes it, that he alone of all the British rustics who 
tilled and lived along with him, on whom the blessed 
sun on that same 'fifth day of September* was 
shining, should have chanced to rise on us ; that this 
poor pair of clouted Shoes, out of the million mil- 
lion hides that have been tanned, and cut, and worn, 
should still subsist, and hang visibly together ? We 
see him but for a moment; for one moment, the 



74 CARLYLE 

blanket of the Night is rent asunder, so that we be- 
hold and see, and then closes over him — forever. 
"So too, in some BoswelVs Life of Johnson, how 
indelible and magically bright does many a little 
Reality dwell in our remembrance! There is no 
need that the personages on the scene be a King and 
Clown; that the scene be the Forest of the Royal 
Oak, 'on the borders of Staffordshire': need only 
that the scene lie on this old firm Earth of ours, 
where we also have so surprisingly arrived ; that the 
personages be men, and seen with the eyes of a man. 
Foolish enough, how some slight, perhaps mean and 
even ugly incident, if real and well presented, will fix 
itself in a susceptive memory, and lie ennobled there; 
silvered over with the pale cast of thought, with the 
pathos which belongs only to the Dead. For the 
Past is all holy to us; the Dead are all holy, even 
they that were base and wicked when alive. Their 
baseness and wickedness was not They, was but the 
heavy and unmanageable Environment that lay 
round them, with which they fought unprevailing : 
they (the ethereal god-given Force that dwelt in 
them, and was their Self) have now shuffled off that 
heavy Environment, and are free and pure: their 
lifelong Battle, go how it might, is all ended, with 



THE THEORY TESTED 75 

many wounds or with fewer; they have been re- 
called from it, and the once harsh- jarring battlefield 
has become a silent awe-inspiring Golgotha, and 
Gottesacker (Field of God) ! — Boswell relates this 
in itself smallest and poorest of occurrences : *As we 
walked along the Strand to-night, arm in arm, a 
woman of the town accosted us in the usual enticing 
manner. *No, no, my girl,' said Johnson ; *it won't 
do/ He, however, did not treat her with harshness ; 
and we talked of the wretched life of such women/ 
Strange power of Reality! Not even this poorest 
of occurrences, but now, after seventy years are 
come and gone, has a meaning for us. Do but con- 
sider that it is true; that it did in very deed occur ! 
That unhappy Outcast, with all her sins and woes, 
her lawless desires, too complex mischances, her 
wailings and her riotings, has departed utterly ; alas ! 
her siren finery has got all besmutched, ground, 
generations since, into dust and smoke; of her de- 
graded body, and whole miserable earthly existence, 
all is away : she is no longer here, but far from us, 
in the bosom of Eternity, — whence we too came, 
whither we too are bound ! Johnson said, 'No, no, 
my girl; it won't do'; and then *we talked'; — and 
herewith the wretched one, seen but for the twink- 



76 CARLYLE 

ling of an eye, passes on into the utter Darkness. 
No high Calista, that ever issued from story-teller*s 
brain, will impress us more deeply than this mean- 
est of the mean; and for a good reason: That she 
issued from the Maker of Men. 

"It is well worth the Artist's while to examine for 
himself what it is that gives such pitiful incidents 
their memorableness ; his aim likewise is, above all 
things, to be memorable. Half the effect, we already 
perceive, depends on the object; on its being real, 
on its being really seen. The other half will depend 
on the observer, and the question now is : How are 
real objects to be so seen, on what quality of ob- 
iserving, or of style in describing, does this so in- 
tense pictorial power depend? Often a slight cir- 
cumstance contributes curiously to the result — some 
little, and perhaps to appearance accidental, feature 
is presented; a light-gleam, which instantaneously 
excites the mind, and urges it to complete the pic- 
ture and evolve the meaning thereof for itself. By 
critics, such light-gleams and their almost magical 
influence have frequently been noted : but the power 
to produce such, to select such features as will pro- 
duce them, is generally treated as a knack, or trick 
of the trade, a secret for being 'graphic'; whereas 



JUE THEORY TESTED 77^ 

these magical feats are, in truth, rather inspirations ; 
and the gift of performing them, which acts uncon- 
sciously, without forethought, and as if by nature 
alone, is properly a genius for description. 

"One grand, invaluable secret there is, however, 
which includes all the rest, and, what is comfortable, 
lies clearly in every man's power : To have an open, 
loving heart, and what follows from the possession 
of such. Truly it has been said, emphatically in 
these days ought it to be repeated, A loving Heart 
is the beginning of all Knowledge. This it is that 
opens the whole mind, quickens every faculty of the 
intellect to do its fit work, that of knowing; and 
therefrom, by sure consequence, of vividly uttering- 
forth. Other secret for being 'graphic* is there 
none, worth having : but this is an all-sufficient one. 
See, for example, what a small Boswell can do! 
Hereby, indeed, is the whole man made a living 
mirror, wherein the wonders of this ever-wonderful 
Universe are, in their true light (which is ever 
a magical, miraculous one) represented, and re- 
flected back on us. It has been said, *the heart sees 
farther than the head'; but, indeed, without the 
seeing heart, there is no true seeing for the head 
so much as possible ; all is mere oversight, hallucina- 



78 CARLYLE 

tion and vain superficial phantasmagoria, which can 
permanently profit no one. 

"Here, too, may we not pause for an instant and 
make a practical reflection ? Considering the multi- 
tude of mortals that handle the Pen in these days, 
and can mostly spell and write without glaring viola- 
tions of grammar, the question naturally arises: 
How is it, then, that no Work proceeds from them, 
bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; 
of worth for more than one day? Shiploads of 
Fashionable Novels, Sentimental Rhymes, Trag- 
edies, Farces, Diaries of Travel, Tales by flood and 
field, are swallowed monthly into the bottomless 
Pool. Still does the Press toil : innumerable Paper- 
makers, Compositors, Printers* Devils, Bookbinders 
and Hawkers grown hoarse with loud proclaiming, 
rest not from their labour: and still, in torrents, 
rushes on the great array of Publications, unpaus- 
ing, to their final home; and still Oblivion, like the 
Grave, cries. Give ! give ! How is it that of all these 
countless multitudes, no one can attain to the small- 
est mark of excellence, or produce aught that shall 
endure longer than *snow-flake on the river* or the 
foam of penny beer ? We answer : Because they are 
foam; because there is no Reality in them. These 



THE THEORY TESTED 79 

three thousand men, women and children that make 
up the army of British Authors do not, if we will con- 
sider it, see anything whatever, consequently have 
nothing that they can record and utter, only more 
or fewer things that they can plausibly pretend to 
record. The Universe, of Man and Nature, is still 
quite shut up from them, the 'open secret' still ut- 
terly a secret; because no sympathy with Man or 
Nature, no love and free simplicity of heart has yet 
unfolded the same. Nothing but a pitiful Image of 
their own pitiful Self, with its vanities and grudg- 
ings and ravenous hunger of all kinds, hangs for- 
ever painted in the retina of these unfortunate per- 
sons ; so that the starry All, with whatsoever it em- 
braces, does not appear as some expanded magic- 
lantern shadow of that same Image, — and naturally 
looks pitiful enough. 

**It is vain for these persons to allege that they 
are naturally without gift, naturally stupid and 
sightless, and so can attain to no knowledge of any- 
thing; therefore, in writing of anything, must need 
write falsehoods of it, there being in it no truth for 
them. Not so, good friends. The stupidest of you 
has a certain faculty; were it but that of articulate 
speech (say, in the Scottish, the Irish, the Cockney 



80 CARLYLE 

dialect, or even in 'Governess-English'), and of 
physically discerning what lies under your nose. The 
stupidest of you would perhaps grudge to be com- 
pared in faculty with James Boswell; yet see what 
he has produced ! You do not use your faculty hon- 
estly; your heart is shut up; full of greediness, ma- 
lice, discontent; so your intellectual sense can not 
be open. It is vain also to urge that James Boswell 
had opportunities ; saw great men and great things, 
such as you can never hope to look on. What make 
ye of Parson White in Selborne? He had not only 
no great men to look on, but not even men ; merely 
sparrows and cock-chafers: yet he has left us a 
Biography of these; which, under its title. Natural 
History of Selborne, still remains valuable to us, 
which has copied a little sentence or two faithfully 
from the Inspired Volume of Nature, and so is itself 
not without inspiration. Go ye and do likewise. 
Sweep away utterly all frothiness and falsehood 
from your heart; struggle unweariedly to acquire, 
what is possible for every God-created man, a free, 
open, humble soul ; speak not at all, in any wise, till \ 
you have somewhat to speak; care not for the re- 
ward of your speaking; but simply and with un- 



THE THEORY TESTED 81 

divided mind for the truth of your speaking : then 
be placed in what section of Space and of Time so- 
ever, do but open your eyes, and they shall actually 
see, and bring you real knowledge, wondrous, 
worthy of belief; and instead of one Boswell and 
one White, the world will rejoice in a thousand, 
stationed on their thousand several watch-towers, — * 
to instruct us by indubitable documents, of what- 
soever in our so stupendous World comes to light 
and is! Oh, had the Editor of this Magazine but 
a magic rod to turn all that not inconsiderable In- 
tellect, which now deluges us with artificial ficti- 
tious soap-lather and mere Lying, into the faithful 
study of Reality, — what knowledge of great, ever- 
lasting Nature, and of Man's ways and doings 
therein, would not every year bring us in ! Can we 
but change one single soap-latherer and mountebank 
Juggler, into a true Thinker and Doer, who even 
tries honestly to think and do, — great will be our 
reward." 

No passage that Carlyle ever wrote deserves closer 
study, for it sets forth not only his theory as to the 
writing of History and Biography, and his underly- 
ing philosophy of Reality, but also the personal 



82 CARLYLE 

qualities which he deemed essential to the perform- 
ance of the work which was to fill the remainder of 
his life. 

The closing paragraphs of the essay on Biography 
are devoted to Boswell's Life of Johnson, which had 
been re-edited by Croker in 1831. Carlyle promises 
an extended review of the five volumes in the fol- 
lowing number of Fraser's Magazine (May, 1832). 
This essay, which is probably more familiar to the 
general reader than any of Carlyle's essays except 
the Burns, is devoted to a concrete demonstration 
of the theoretical principle laid down in the essay 
on Biography. Boswell, it appears, had the "open, 
loving heart," the spirit of discipleship and of hero- 
worship. And this was the secret of his insight: 
"The heart sees further than the head." This book, 
therefore, was True, and possessing Reality, it was 
for that reason genuine Poetry. In the pages of 
Boswell men can still see the immortal figure of 
"great-souled Samuel,'* the "prophet of the Eng- 
lish," the "last genuine Tory." Johnson was a 
"Brave Man," endowed with the talent of Silence; 
a lover of Truth, a hater of Cant. "His Doings and 
Writings are not shows but performances : you may 
weigh them in the balance, and they will stand 



THE THEORY TESTED 83 

weight." And Mercy dwells with Johnson's Valor ; 
"a true brother of men is he; and fihal lover of the 
Earth." He had of course his prejudices, his blind- 
ness to the European movement of ideas. But, as 
Browning was to say long afterward, 

"So we half-men struggle." 

Could we but combine, — Carlyle declares in clos- 
ing, — the Candor and Clearness of Hume with the 
Reverence, the Love and devout Humility of John- 
son, we should have "the whole man of a new time." 
"The whole man of a new time" : those words 
are a sort of pivot on which the Carlyle theory of 
history and biography swings into the Carlyle 
theory of conduct. Endowed with a strong ethical 
sense and an acute social consciousness, it was as 
natural for this man as it was for Count Tolstoi 
to ask "What then is to be done?" In Sartor^ in 
Heroes, in Chartism'sind in The Latter-Day Pam- 
phlets we shall see this vision of the "new time," — 
the epoch chanted by Tennyson in his first Locks- 
ley Hall, and described in the novels of Charles 
Dickens. All of Carlyle's books, in fact, might be 
characterized as "Tracts for the Times." The end 
of life is not Thought, but Action; this is the key 



84 CARLYLE 

in which the motor-minded Scotchman was to write 
for thirty years. 

In the revelatory group of essays which we are 
now reviewing, the clearest confession of Carlyle's 
theory of conduct will be found in Signs of the 
Times (1829) and Characteristics (1831). The 
first of these essays preceded the composition of 
Sartor, and the second was Carlyle's first piece of 
writing after Sartor was finished. Taken together, 
they contain almost every article of Carlyle's ethi- 
cal and social creed. 

He begins Signs of the Times, for example, by 
declaring that "Our grand business undoubtedly is 
not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do 
what lies clearly at hand." The Age of Machinery 
in which men are living has led to a loss of faith in 
individual endeavor. It is not merely Science and 
Philosophy that are conducted on mechanical prin- 
ciples, the same faith in mere mechanism is visible 
in Politics. But since human love and fear are in- 
finite, no finite mechanism can be a source of happi- 
ness. Profit and loss are not final agents. "Dyna- 
mic" as well as "mechanical" forces are needed for 
the true conduct of life. Faith counts for more 
than "logic." "One man that has a higher Wisdom, 



THE THEORY TESTED 85 

a hitherto unknown spiritual truth in him, is 
stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than 
ten thousand, but than all men that have it not." 
And Carlyle closes by asserting his ** faith in the im- 
perishable dignity of man." The world is still 
"plastic, infinite, divine." Though the time is sick 
and out of joint, and the thinking minds of all na- 
tions call for change, there is nevertheless hope for 
humanity under a higher guidance than ours. The 
only solid reformation is what each man "begins and 
perfects on himself." 

Characteristics — a title borrowed from the fa- 
mous essay of Fichte — is even more rich than Signs 
of the Times in those pregnant thoughts and phrases 
which were destined to become the burden of Car- 
lyle*s teaching to his generation. Nowhere has he 
explained more suggestively that doctrine of "Si- 
lence" which has often been misunderstood even by 
Carlyle's followers. Let us see how he develops it. 
The test of the right working of all vital powers, 
he asserts, is unconsciousness. Unity is always 
silent; it is discord that is loud. Unconsciousness 
is the sign of health. "Of our thinking, we might 
say, it is but the mere upper surface that we shape 
into articulate thoughts ; — underneath the region of 



86 CARLYLE 

argument and conscious discourse, lies the region of 
meditation; here, in its quiet mysterious depths, 
dwells what vital force is in us; here, if aught is to 
be created, and not merely manufactured and com- 
municated, must the work go on." ("£/aw vital/^ 
as Bergson might say!) Hence the distinction, 
touched upon in an earlier essay, between the "man 
of logic" and the "man of insight." But this dis- 
tinction is equally true of conduct, and of the life of 
society. The Body Politic must be Unconscious, if 
it is to perform its functions rightly. This uncon- 
scious performance of function is "Silence," "Har- 
mony," "Life" itself. But our actual contemporary 
society, says Carlyle, is intensely self-conscious, or, 
in other words, diseased. "Man remains unserved, 
he has subdued this Planet, his habitation and in- 
heritance; yet reaps no profit from the victory. 
. . . Countries are rich, prosperous in all man- 
ner of increase, beyond example: but the Men 
of those countries are poor, needier than ever of all 
sustenance outward and inward; of Belief, of 
Money, of Food." 

It will be noticed that Carlyle, the child of Cal- 
vinism, puts "Belief" first in this list of wants. He 
finds that vitality has fled from religion : with self- 



THE THEORY TESTED 87 

consciousness it has become less potent and more 
mechanical. Inspiration is disappearing from litera- 
ture. And the remedy, if there be a remedy for 
these social ills ? It lies in the Aristotelian maxim : 
"The end of man is an Action, not a Thought." We 
are to be saved through Work, and there can be no 
creative labor without Faith. New captains of 
men must be sought after, and they must govern by 
loyalty. "The Age of Miracles, as it ever was, nowi 
is'\' the deep, vital, unconscious forces of the world 
beat through the pulses of every man who labors 
in faith. Whatsoever, then, thy hand findeth to do, 
do it with thy might. 

Carlyle never wrote with more moving power, and 
rarely did he write, in his later days, with such as- 
surance of social faith. He had just worked out, 
in Sartor, the problem of the individual; and now, 
as we re-read Characteristics, we can trace the high- 
water mark of his hopes for the communal life. For 
undeniably, these hopes were fated to ebb. Carlyle 
thundered and lightened in book after book his 
magnificent antiphonals of Silence and Labor and 
Loyalty; but his new Captains of humanity not be- 
ing discoverable — by him — he gradually lost faith 
in the progress of society, and after glorifying 



88 CARLYLE 

Cromwell and Mahomet and Mirabeau he ended by 
chanting the praises of the "beneficent whip" and of 
lean Frederick of Prussia. 

We must turn now to this series of famous books, 
and note in them the reappearance and the modifica- 
tion of those fundamental thoughts and those in- 
stinctive modes of workmanship which we have just 
been observing in the Essays. 



CHAPTER X 



SARTOR RESARTUS 



SARTOR RESARTUS ("The Tailor 
Patched") is, as Garnett has said, a "book spun 
from a single metaphor." It professes to deal with 
the Philosophy of Clothes: the inner meaning is 
that man and society are only vestures, — transient 
wrappings and symbols of the one Reality, God. 
Carlyle found the framework of his idea in Swift's 
Tale of a Tub. At first, he played with this notion 
of Vestures ( — "I am going to write — Nonsense") 
intending a mere magazine article, but the thought 
took possession of him, and he wrote on impetuously 
during the first six months of 1831 until, as Pro- 
fessor MacMechan says in his admirable edition of 
Sartor, he had drawn "into the compass of a single 
volume all the best that he had thought in his past 
life." 

In outward form, the book is a literary hoax. It 
claims to be an account by an "English editor" of 

89 



90 CARLYLE 

a singular book on "Clothes, their Origin and In- 
fluence" ("Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken") 
which had just been published in Germany. The 
author was a certain Diogenes Teufelsdrockh 
(**God-Born Devirs-Dung" ) , Professor of Things 
in General at the University of Weiss-nicht-wo, 
that is to say "Nowhere,"— "Utopia." The Pro- 
fessor's book, which the "editor" can present only 
in fragments, is in three parts. The first and third 
are devoted to various aspects of clothes-philosophy/ 
but the second professes to be an autobiography of 
Teufelsdrockh himself. Carlyle utilizes this second 
part to tell the epoch-making phases of his own de- 
velopment, from earliest childhood. The imaginary 
German village of Entepfuhl ("Duck-pond") is 
really Ecclefechan; "Hinterschlag" Academy is 
Annan, and the "nameless" University is Edin- 
burgh. But this actual autobiography of Carlyle 
is mingled throughout with pure fantasy, with pass- 
ages from Carlyle's abortive romance Wotton Rein- 
fred, and with grave circumstantial descriptions of 
German life, in the manner of Defoe and Swift. 
Sartor, therefore, conforms to Dryden's definition 
of Satire in that it is "full of various matter" ; and 
it also takes the full liberty of Satire in its range of 



SARTOR RESARTUS 91 

style. Inventing a "German" book for the English 
public of the eighteen-thirties, — whose sole notion 
of things "German" was that they were likely to be 
queer, — Carlyle gave full rein to his talent for fool- 
ery and for grotesque extravagance. At bottom, 
as in all his books, there is a perfectly clear and sim- 
ple plan, evolved by a cunning literary artist, but 
the surface of Sartor is ruffled and blown this way 
and that by the whimsical, bedevilling humors of a 
master satirist. 

We must limit ourselves to five passages from 
Sartor, Each is very famous and needs little or no 
elucidation. The first is the description (Book I, 
Chapter 3) of Teufelsdrockh's watch-tower, in the 
city of Weissnichtwo. 

The Watch-Tower 

"To the Editor of these sheets, as to a young en- 
thusiastic Englishman, however unworthy, Teufels- 
drockh opened himself perhaps more than to the 
most. Pity only that we could not then half guess 
his importance, and scrutinise him with due power 
of vision! We enjoyed, what not three men in 
Weissnichtwo could boast of, a certain degree of 
access to the Professor's private domicile. It was the 



92 CARLYLE 

attic floor of the highest house in the Wahngasse; 
and might truly be called the pinnacle of Weiss- 
nichtwo, for it rose sheer up above the contiguous 
roofs, themselves rising from elevated ground. 
Moreover, with its windows, it looked towards all 
the four Orte, or as the Scotch say, and we ought to 
say, Airts: the Sitting-room itself commanded 
three; another came to view in the Schlafgemach 
(Bed-room) at the opposite end; to say nothing of 
the Kitchen, which offered two, as it were duplicates, 
and showing nothing new. So that it was in fact 
the speculum or watch-tower of Teufelsdrockh; 
where from, sitting at ease, he might see the whole 
life-circulation of that considerable City; the streets 
and lanes of which, with all their doing and driving 
(Thun und Treiben), were for the most part visible 
there. 

" *I look down into all that wasp-nest or bee-hive,' 
have we heard him say, *and witness their wax-lay- 
ing and honey-making, and poison-brewing, and 
choking by sulphur. From the Palace esplanade, 
where music plays while Serene Highness is pleased 
to eat his victuals, down to the low lane, where in 
her door-sill the aged widow, knitting for a thin live- 
lihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun, I see it all; for, 



SARTOR RESARTUS 93 

except the Schlosskirche weathercock, no biped 
stands so high. Couriers arrive bestrapped and be- 
booted, bearing Joy and Sorrow bagged-up in 
pouches of leather; there, topladen, and with four 
swift horses, rolls-in the country Baron and his 
household; here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier 
hops painfully along, begging alms : a thousand car- 
riages, and wains, and cars, come tumbling-in with 
Food, with young Rusticity, and other Raw Pro- 
duce, inanimate or animate, and go tumbling out 
again with Produce manufactured. That living 
flood, pouring through these streets, of all quali- 
ties and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, 
whither it is going ? Aus der Ewigkeit, zu der Ewig- 
keit hin: From Eternity, onward to Eternity ! These 
are Apparitions: what else? Are they not souls 
rendered visible ; in Bodies, that took shape and will 
lose it, melting into air? Their solid pavement is a 
Picture of the Sense; they walk on the bosom of 
Nothing, blank Time is behind them and before 
them. Or fanciest thou, the red and yellow Clothes- 
screen yonder, with spurs on its heels, and feather 
in its crown, is but of Today, without a Yesterday 
or a Tomorrow; and had not rather its Ancestor 
alive when Hengst and Horsa overran thy Island? 



94 CARLYLE 

Friend, thou seest here a living link in that Tissue of 
History, which inweaves all Being : watch well, or it 
will be past thee, and seen no more. 

" 'Ach, mein Lieherf said he once, at midnight, 
when he had returned from the Coffee-house in 
rather earnest talk, *it is a true sublimity to dwell 
here. These fringes of lamp-light, struggling up 
through smoke and thousandfold exhalation, some 
fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks 
Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over 
the Zenith, in their leash of sidereal fire? That 
stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down 
to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still roll- 
ing here and there through distant streets, are bear- 
ing her to Halls roofed-in, and lighted to the due 
pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl 
or to moan like nightbirds, are abroad; that hum 
I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick 
Life; is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous 
coverlet of vapors, and putrefactions, and unimag- 
inable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering 
and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; 
men are dying there, men are being born, men are 
praying, — on the other side of a brick partition, men 



SARTOR RESARTUS 95 

are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void 
Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his per- 
fumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; 
Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers 
hunger-stricken into its lair of straw: in obscure 
cellars, Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice-of- 
destiny to haggard hungry Villains; while Council- 
lors of State sit plotting, and playing their high 
chess-game, whereof the pawns are Men. The 
Lover whispers his mistress that the coach is ready ; 
and she, full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly 
with him over the borders : the Thief, still more si- 
lently, sets-to his picklocks and crowbars, or lurks 
in wait till the watchmen first snore in their boxes. 
Gay mansions, with supper-rooms, and dancing- 
rooms, are full of light and music and high-swelling 
hearts; but, in the Condemned Cells, the pulse of 
life beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot eyes 
look out through the darkness, which is around and 
within, for the light of a stern last morning. Six 
men are to be hanged on the morrow: comes no 
hammering from the Rahenstein? — their gallows 
must even now be o' building. Upwards of five-hun- 
dred-thousand two-legged animals without feathers 



96 CARLYLE 

lie around us, in horizontal positions; their heads 
all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. 
Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his 
rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with stream- 
ing hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose 
cracked lips only her tears now moisten. — All these 
heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a 
little carpentry and masonry between them; — 
crammed in, like salted fish, in their barrel ; or wel- 
tering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed 
Vipers, each struggling to get its head above the 
others : such work goes on under that smoke-coun- 
terpane! — But I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I 
am alone with the Stars/ 

"We looked in his face to see whether, in the utter- 
ance of such extraordinary Night-thoughts, no feel- 
ing might be traced there ; but with the light we had, 
which indeed was only a single tallow-light, and far 
enough from the window, nothing save that old 
calmness and fixedness was visible." 

The second must be the well-known parable of 
Carlyle's own moment of revolt and illumination 
on Leith Walk, Edinburgh, in the summer of 1821 
or 1822. (Book 2, Chapter 7.) 



SARTOR RESARTUS 97 

The Everlasting No 

" *So had it lasted/ concludes the Wanderer, 'so 
had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony, 
through long years. The heart within me, unvisited 
by any heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sul- 
phurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since ear- 
liest memory I had shed no tear ; or one only when I, 
murmuring half -audibly, recited Faust's Deathsong, 
that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet 
(Happy whom he finds in Battle's splendour), and 
thought that of this last Friend even I was not for- 
saken, that Destiny itself could not doom me not to 
die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite 
fear, were it of Man or of Devil: nay, I often felt 
as if it might be solacing, could the Arch-Devil him- 
self, though in Tartarean terrors, but rise to me, 
that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, 
strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, 
pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive 
of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in 
the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would 
hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but 
boundless jaws of a devouring monster wherein I, 
palpitating, waited to be devoured. 



98 CARLYLE 

** 'Full of such humour, and perhaps the misera- 
blest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, 
was I, one sultry Dog-day, after much perambula- 
tion, toiling along the dirty little Rue Saint-Thomas 
de VEnfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close 
atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchad- 
nezzar's Furnace ; whereby doubtless my spirits were 
little cheered ; when all at once, there rose a Thought 
in me, and I asked myself : 'What art thou afraid 
of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever 
pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? 
Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst 
that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say 
the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and 
Man may, will, or can do against thee ! Hast thou 
not a heart ; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be ; 
and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, tram- 
ple Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes 
thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it !' 
And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of 
fire over my whole soul ; and I shook base Fear away 
from me forever. I was strong, of unknown 
strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that 
time, the temper of my misery was changed: not 



SARTOR RESARTUS 99 

Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and 
grim fire-eyed Defiance. 

" *Thus had the Everlasting No (das ewige 
Nein) pealed authoritatively through all the recesses 
of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my 
whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, 
and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a 
Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may 
that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychologi- 
cal point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting 
No had said : 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, 
and the Universe is mine (the Devil's) ;' to which 
my whole Me now made answer: */ am not thine, 
but Free, and forever hate thee !' 

" Tt is from this hour that I incline to date my 
Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; 
perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.' " 

The picture of War (Book 2, Chapter 7) is as 
ghastly true for the battle-summer of 1915 as it 
was for the campaigns of Napoleon. 

War 

" *E[orrible enough ! A whole March f eld strewed 
with shell-splinters, cannon-shot, ruined tumbrils, 



100 CARLYLE 

and dead men and horses ; stragglers still remaining 
not so much as buried. And those red mould heaps : 
ay, there lie the Shells of Men, out of which all the 
Life and Virtue has been blown; and now they are 
swept together, and crammed-down out of sight, like 
blown Egg-shells ! — Did Nature, when she bade the 
Donau bring down his mould-cargoes from the Ca- 
rinthian and Carpathian Heights, and spread them 
out here into the softest, richest level, — intend thee, 
O March f eld, for a corn-bearing Nursery, whereon 
her children might be nursed; or for a Cockpit, 
wherein they might the more commodiously be throt- 
tled and tattered ? Were thy three broad highways, 
meeting here from the ends of Europe, made for 
Ammunition- wagons, then? Were thy Wagrams 
and Stillfrieds but so many ready-built Casemates^ 
wherein the house of Hapsburg might batter with 
artillery, and with artillery be battered? Konig 
Ottokar, amid yonder hillocks, dies under Rodolf's 
truncheon; here Kaiser Franz falls a-swoon undef 
Napoleon's : within which five centuries, to omit the 
others, how hast thy breast, fair Plain, been defaced 
and defiled! The greensward is torn-up and tram- 
pled-down; man's fond care of it, his fruit-trees, 
hedge-rows, and pleasant dwellings, blown-away 



SARTOR RESARTUS 101 

with gunpowder ; and the kind seedfield Hes a deso- 
late, hideous Place of Sculls. — Nevertheless, Nature 
is at work; neither shall these Powder-Devilkins 
with their utmost devilry gainsay her: but all that 
gore and carnage will be shrouded-in, absorbed into 
manure; and next year the March f eld will be green, 
nay greener. Thrifty unwearied Nature, ever out 
of our great waste educing some little profit of thy 
own, — how dost thou, from the very carcass of the 
Killer, bring Life for the Living! 

** 'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is 
the net-purport and upshot of war? To my own 
knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the 
British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five 
hundred souls. From these, by certain 'Natural 
Enemies* of the French, there are successively 
selected, during the French war, say thirty able- 
bodied men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has 
suckled and nursed them ; she has, not without diffi- 
culty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and 
even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, 
another build, another hammer, and the weakest can 
stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, 
amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected ; 
all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public 



102 CARLYLE 

charges, some two-thousand miles, or say only to the 
south of Spain ; and fed there till wanted. And now 
to that same spot in the south of Spain, are thirty 
similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, 
in like manner wending : till at length, after infinite 
effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposi- 
tion; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with 
a gun in his hand. Straightway the word *Fire !' is 
given: and they blow the souls out of one another; 
and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the 
world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, 
and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quar- 
rel? Busy as the Devil is, not. the smallest! They 
lived far enough apart ; were the entirest strangers ; 
nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even uncon- 
sciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness be- 
tween them. How then? Simpleton! their Gover- 
nors had fallen-out; and, instead of shooting one 
another, had the cunning to make these poor block- 
heads shoot. — Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and 
hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, *what 
devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the 
piper!' — In that fiction of the English Smollett, it 
is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps pro- 
phetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural 



SARTOR RESARTUS 103 

Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled 
with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one 
another's faces till the weaker gives in: but from 
such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled trenches, 
and contentious centuries, may still divide us T " 

The chapter called "The Everlasting Yea" (Book 
2, Chapter 9) is, as we have already seen in the 
quotation from Carlyle's Reminiscences, a transcript 
of his own experience in the summer of 1825. 

The Everlasting Yea 



tt <i 



'Beautiful it was to sit there, as in my skyey 
Tent, musing and meditating ; on the high table-land, 
in front of the Mountains; over me, as roof, the 
azure Dome, and around me, for walls, four azure- 
flowing curtains, — namely, of the Four azure Winds, 
on whose bottom- fringes also I have seen gilding. 
And then to fancy the fair Castles, that stood shel- 
tered in these Mountain hollows; with their green 
flower-lawns, and white dames and dainosels, lovely 
enough: or better still, the straw-roofed Cottages, 
wherein stood many a Mother baking bread, with 
her children round her: — all hidden and protect- 
ingly folded up in the valley- folds; yet there and 



104 CARLYLE 

alive, as sure as if I beheld them. Or to see, as well 
as fancy, the nine Towns and Villages, that lay 
round my mountain-seat, which, in still weather, 
were wont to speak to me (by their steeple-bells) 
with metal tongue; and, in almost all weather, pro- 
claimed their vitality by repeated Smoke-clouds; 
whereon, as on a culinary horologue, I might read 
the hour of the day. For it was the smoke of cook- 
ery, as kind housewives at morning, mid-day, even- 
tide, were boiling their husbands' kettles; and ever 
a blue pillar rose up into the air, successively or 
simultaneously, from each of the nine, saying, as 
plainly as smoke could say: Such and such a meal 
is getting ready here. Not uninteresting ! For you 
have the whole Borough, with all its love-makings 
and scandal-mongeries, contentions and content- 
ments, as in miniature, and could cover it all with 
your hat. — If, in my wide Wayfarings, I had 
learned to look into the business of the World in 
its details, here perhaps was the place for combining 
it into general propositions, and deducing inferences 
therefrom. 

" 'Often also I could see the black Tempest 
marching in anger through the distance : round some 
Schreckhorn, as yet grim-blue, would the eddying 



SARTOR RESARTUS 105 

vapour gather, and there tumultuously eddy, and 
flow down like a mad witch's hair; till, after a space, 
it vanished, and, in the clear sunbeam, your Schreck- 
horn stood smiling grim-white, for the vapour had 
held snow. How thou fermentest and elaboratest 
in thy great fermenting-vat and laboratory of an 
Atmosphere, of a World, O Nature! — Or what is 
Nature ? Ha ! why do I not name thee God ? Art 
thou not the 'Living Garment of God' ? O Heavens, 
is it, in very deed. He, then, that ever speaks through 
thee ; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves 
in me? 

" Tore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, 
of that Truth, and Beginning of Truths, fell mys- 
teriously over my soul. Sweeter than Dayspring to 
the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla ; ah, like the moth- 
er's voice to her little child that strays bewildered, 
weeping, in unknown tumults; like soft streamings 
of celestial music to my too-exasperated heart, came 
that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and de- 
moniacal, a charnel-house with spectres ; but godlike, 
and my Father's ! 

" 'With other eyes, too, could I now look upon my 
fellow man : with an infinite Love, an infinite Pity. 
Poor, wandering, wayward man ! Art thou not tried. 



106 CARLYLE 

and beaten with stripes, even as I am? Ever, 
whether thou bear the royal mantle or the beggar's 
gabardine, art thou not so weary, so heavy-laden; 
and thy Bed of Rest is but a Grave. O my Brother, 
my Brother, why can not I shelter thee in my bosom, 
and wipe away all tears from thy eyes ! — Truly, the 
din of many-voiced Life, which, in this solitude, 
with the mind's organ, I could hear, was no longer 
a maddening discord, but a melting one; like in- 
articulate cries, and sobbings of a dumb creature, 
which in the ear of Heaven are prayers. The poor 
Earth, with her poor joys, was now my needy 
Mother, not my cruel Stepdame; Man, with his so 
mad Wants and so mean Endeavours, had become 
the dearer to me; and even for his sufferings and 
his sins, I now first named him Brother. Thus was 
I standing in the porch of that *^ Sanctuary of Sor- 
row/' by strange, steep ways, had I too been guided 
thither; and ere long its sacred gates would open, 
and the "Divine Depth of Sorrow" lie disclosed to 
me.' 

"The Professor says, he here first got eye on the 
Knot that had been strangling him, and straightway 
could unfasten it, and was free. *A vain intermina- 
ble controversy,' writes he, 'touching what is at 



SARTOR RESARTUS 107 

present called Origin of Evil, or some such thing, 
arises in every soul, since the beginning of the 
world ; and in every soul, that would pass from idle 
Suffering into actual Endeavouring, must first be 
put an end to. The most, in our time, have to go 
content with a simple, incomplete enough Suppres- 
sion of this controversy; to a few, some Solution 
of it is indispensable. In every new era, too, such 
Solution comes-out in different terms ; and ever the 
Solution of the last era has become obsolete, and is 
found unserviceable. For it is man's nature to 
change his Dialect from century to century; he can 
not help it though he would. The authentic Church- 
Catechism of our present century has not yet fallen 
into my hands : meanwhile, for my own private be- 
hoof, I attempt to elucidate the matter so. Man's 
Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; 
it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with 
all his cunning he can not quite bury under the 
Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Up- 
holsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe un- 
dertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoe- 
black HAPPY? They can not accomplish it, above 
an hour or two : for the Shoeblack also has a Soul 
quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if 



108 CARLYLE 

you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and 
saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no 
less: God's infinite Universe altogether to himself j 
therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast 
as it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like 
that of Ophiuchus : speak not of them ; to the infinite 
Shoeblack they are as nothing. No sooner is your 
ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have 
been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Uni- 
verse, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with 
the proprietor of the other half, and declares him- 
self the most maltreated of men. — Always there 
is a black spot in our sunshine : it is even, as I said, 
the Shadow of Ourselves, 

" *But the whim we have of Happiness is some- 
what thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of 
our own striking, we come upon some sort of av- 
erage terrestrial lot ; this we fancy belongs to us by 
nature, and of indefeasible right. It is simple pay- 
ment of our wages, of our deserts; requires neither 
thanks nor complaint; only such overplus as there 
may be do we account Happiness ; any deficit again 
is Misery. Now consider that we have the valuation 
of our own deserts ourselves, and what a fund of 
Self-conceit there is in each of us, — do you wonder 



SARTOR RESARTUS 109 

that the balance should so often dip the wrong way, 
and many a Blockhead cry : See there, what a pay- 
ment; was ever worthy gentleman so used! — I tell 
thee. Blockhead, it all comes of thy Vanity; of what 
thou fanciest those same deserts of thine to be. 
Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most 
likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: 
fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair- 
halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp. 

" 'So true it is, what I then said, that the Fraction 
of Life can be increased in value not so much by 
increasing your Numerator as by lessening your 
Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, 
Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make 
thy claim of wages a zero, then ; thou hast the world 
under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time 
write: *It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) 
that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.' 

"*I asked myself: What is this that, ever since 
earliest years, thou hast been fretting and fuming, 
and lamenting and self-tormenting, on account of? 
Say it in a word: is it not because thou art not 
HAPPY? Because the Thou (sweet gentleman) is 
not sufficiently honoured, nourished, soft-bedded, 
and lovingly cared for? Foolish soul ! What act of 



110 CARLYLE 

Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy ? 
A httle while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. 
What if thou wert born and predestined not to be 
Happy, but to be Unhappy ! Art thou nothing other 
than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Uni- 
verse seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking 
dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? 
Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe/ 

" 'Es leuchtet mir ein, I see a glimpse of it T cries 
he elsewhere : 'there is in man a Higher than Love 
of Happiness : he can do without Happiness, and in- 
stead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to 
preach- forth this same Higher that sages and mar- 
tyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have 
spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through 
life and through death, of the Godlike that is in 
Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength 
and Freedom? Which God-inspired Doctrine art 
thou also honoured to be taught ; O Heavens ! and 
broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till 
thou become contrite, and learn it! O, thank thy 
Destiny for these ; thankfully bear what yet remain : 
thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to 
be annihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is 
Life rooting out the deep-seated chronic Disease, 



SARTOR RESARTUS 111 

and triumphs over Death. On the roaring billows 
of Time, thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into 
the azure of Eternity. Love not Pleasure ; love God. 
This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contra- 
diction is solved : wherein whoso walks and works, 
it is well with him.' " 

Finally, from the chapter entitled "Natural Su- 
pernaturalism" (Book 3, Chapter 9) let us choose 
the magnificent prose-poem which embodies the cen- 
tral metaphor of Sartor Resartus, 

The Illusions of Space and Time, 

" *But the deepest of all illusory Appearances, for 
hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your 
two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appear- 
ances, Space and Time. Jhese, as spun and woven 
for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our ce- 
lestial Me for dwelling here, and yet blind to it, — 
lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp 
and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phan- 
tasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In 
vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavour to 
strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them 
asunder for moments, and look through. 



112 CARLYLE 

" 'Fortunatus had a wishing Hat, whicH when he 
put on, and wished himself Anywhere, behold he 
was There. By this means had Fortunatus tri- 
umphed over Space, he had annihilated Space; for 
him there was no Where, but all was Here. Were 
a Hatter to establish himself, in the Wahngasse of 
Weissnichtwo, and make felts of this sort for all 
mankind, what a world we should have of it! Still 
stranger, on the opposite side of the street, another 
Hatter establish himself; and, as his fellow-crafts- 
man made Space-annihilating Hats, make Time-an- 
nihilating! Of both would I purchase, were it with 
my last groschen; but chiefly of this latter. To clap- 
on your felt, and, simply by wishing that you were 
Anywhere, straightway to be There! Next to clap-on 
your other felt, and simply by wishing that you 
were Any when, and straightway to be Then! This 
were indeed the grander : shooting at will from the 
Fire-Creation of the World to its Fire-Consumma- 
tion ; here historically present in the First Century, 
conversing face to face with Paul and Seneca ; there 
prophetically in the Thirty-first, conversing also face 
to face with other Pauls and Senecas, who as yet 
stand hidden in the depth of that late Time ! 

" *0r thinkest thou, it were impossible, unimag- 



SARTOR RESARTUS 113 

inable ? Is the Past annihilated, then, or only past ; 
is the Future non-extant or only future? Those 
mystic faculties of thine, Memory and Hope, already 
answer : already through those mystic avenues, thou 
the Earth-blinded summonest both Past and Future, 
and communest with them, though as yet darkly, 
and with mute beckonings. The curtains of Yester- 
day drop down, the curtains of Tomorrow roll up; 
but Yesterday and Tomorrow both are. Pierce 
through the Time-Element, glance into the Eternal. 
Believe what thou findest written in the sanctuaries 
of Man's Soul, even as all Thinkers, in all ages, 
have devoutly read it there: that Time and Space 
are not God, but creations of God; that with God 
as it is a universal Here, so it is an everlasting Now. 
" *And seest thou therein any glimpse of Immor- 
tality? — O Heaven! Is the white Tomb of our 
Loved One, who died from our arms, and had to be 
left behind us there, which rises in the distance, like 
a pale, mournfully receding Milestone, to tell how 
many toilsome uncheered miles we have journeyed 
on alone, — but a pale spectral Illusion ! Is the lost 
Friend still mysteriously Here, even as we are Here 
mysteriously, with God ! — Know of a truth that only 
the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; 



114 CARLYLE 

that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever 
is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever. 
This, should it unhappily seem new, thou mayst pon- 
der at thy leisure ; for the next twenty years, or the 
next twenty centuries : believe it thou must ; under- 
stand it thou canst not. 

" 'That the Thought- forms. Space and Time, 
wherein, once for all, we are sent into this Earth to 
live, should condition and determine our whole Prac- 
tical reasonings, conceptions, and imagings or imag- 
inings — seems altogether fit, just, and unavoidable. 
But that they should, furthermore, usurp silch sway 
over pure spiritual Meditation, and blind us to the 
wonder everywhere lying close on us, seems nowise 
so. Admit Space and Time to their due rank as 
Forms of Thought; nay, even, if thou wilt, to their 
quite undue rank of Realities: and consider, then, 
with thyself how their thin disguises hide from us 
the brightest God-effulgences! Thus, were it not 
miraculous, could I stretch forth my hand, and 
clutch the Sun? Yet thou seest me daily stretch 
forth my hand and therewith clutch many a thing, 
and swing it hither and thither. Art thou a grown 
baby, then, to fancy that the Miracle lies in miles of 
distance, or in pounds avoirdupois of weight; and 



SARTOR RESARTUS 115 

not to see that the true inexplicable God-revealing 
Miracle lies in this, that I can stretch forth my hand 
at all ; that I have free Force to clutch aught there- 
with ? Innumerable other of this sort are the decep- 
tions, and wonder-hiding stupefactions, which Space 
practises on us. 

" 'Still worse is it with regard to Time. Your 
grand anti-magician, and universal wonder-hider, is 
this same lying Time. Had we but the Time-anni- 
hilating Hat, to put on for once only, we should see 
ourselves in a World of Miracles, wherein all fabled 
or authentic Thaumaturgy, and feats of Magic, 
were outdone. But unhappily we have not such a 
Hat ; and man, poor fool that he is, can seldom and 
scantily help himself without one. 

" *Were it not wonderful, for instance, had Or- 
pheus, or Amphion, built the walls of Thebes by 
the mere sound of his Lyre ? Yet tell me. Who built 
these walls of Weissnichtwo ; summoning out all the 
sandstone rocks, to dance along from the Steinbruch 
(now a huge Troglodyte Chasm, with frightful 
green-mantled pools) ; and shape themselves into 
Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and 
noble streets ? Was it not the still higher Orpheus, 
or Orpheuses, who, in past centuries, by the divine 



116 CARLYLE 

Music of Wisdom, succeeded in civilising man? Our 
highest Orpheus walked in Judea, eighteen hundred 
years ago : his sphere-melody, flowing in wild native 
tones, took captive the ravished souls of men; and 
being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows and 
sounds, though now with thousandfold accompani- 
ments, and rich symphonies, through all our hearts ; 
and modulates, and divinely leads them. Is that a 
wonder, which happens in two hours; and does it 
cease to be wonderful if happening in two million? 
Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Or- 
pheus; but without the music of some inspired Or- 
pheus was no city ever built, no work that man 
glories in ever done. 

" *Sweep away the Illusion of Time; glance, if 
thou have eyes, from the near moving-cause to its 
far-distant Mover : The stroke that came transmit- 
ted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it 
less a stroke than if the last ball only had been 
struck, and sent flying? O, could I (with the Time- 
annihilating Hat) transport thee direct from the 
Beginnings to the Endings, how were thy eyesight 
unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the Light-sea 
of celestial wonder! Then sawest thou that this 
fair Universe, were it in the meanest province 



SARTOR RESARTUS 117 

thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; 
that through every star, through every grass-blade, 
and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a 
present God still beams. But Nature, which is the 
Time- vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, 
hides Him from the foolish. 

" * Again, could anything be more miraculous than 
an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson 
longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though 
he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church- 
vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor ! Did 
he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the 
body's, look round him into that full tide of human 
Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into 
Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual 
and authentic as heart could wish ; well-nigh a mil- 
lion of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. 
Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time ; 
compress the threescore years into three minutes: 
what else was he, what else are we? Are we not 
Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appear- 
ance ; and that fade away again into air and Invisi- 
bility ? This is no metaphor, it is a simple, scientific 
fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and 
are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest 



118 CARLYLE 

spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as 
years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love and 
Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song 
of beatified Souls? And again, do not we squeak 
and gibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish de- 
batings and recriminatings) ; and glide bodeful and 
feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern)^ and revel 
in our mad Dance of the Dead,— till the scent of the 
morning-air summons us to our still Home; and 
dreamy Night becomes awake and Day ? Where now 
is Alexander of Macedon : does the steel Host, that 
yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, re- 
main behind him ; or have they all vanished utterly, 
even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, 
and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns ! 
Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt ; which 
has now, with its howling tumult that made night 
hideous, flitted away? — Ghosts! There are nigh a 
thousand-million walking the Earth openly at noon- 
tide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some 
half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks 
once. 

" *0 Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to con- 
sider that we not only carry each a future Ghost 
>vithin him ; but are, in very deed, Ghosts ! These 



SARTOR RESARTUS 119 

Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; 
this hfe-blood with its burning Passion? They are 
dust and shadow ; a Shadow-system gathered round 
our Me; wherein through some moments or years, 
the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. 
That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes 
through his eyes ; force dwells in his arm and heart ; 
but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed 
Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, 
as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is 
but a film ; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war- 
horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's ? 
Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while 
ago they were not ; a little while, and they are not, 
their very ashes are not. 

" *So it has been from the beginning, so it will be 
to the end. Generation after generation takes to 
itself the Form of a Body; and forth-issuing from 
Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission appears. 
What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one 
grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like 
climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one 
madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in 
war with his fellow : — and then the Heaven-sent is 
recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon 



120 CARLYLE 

even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, 
like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of 
Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious Mankind 
thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding 
grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like 
a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we 
emerge from the Inane ; haste storm fully across the 
astonished Earth ; then plunge again into the Inane. 
Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled 
up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but 
dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality 
and are alive ? On the hardest adamant some foot- 
print of us is stamped-in; the last Rear of the host 
will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence ? — 
O Heaven, whither ? Sense knows not ; Faith knows 
not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, 
from God and to God. 

" * "We are such stuff 
As Dreams are made on, and our little Life 
Is rounded with a sleep !" ' " 



CHAPTER XI 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

WE HAVE already touched upon Carlyle's 
artistic aim in writing his French Revolu- 
tion, and have examined briefly his manner of com- 
position. Before presenting some typical passages, 
let us review, in Garnett's words, the method fol- 
lowed in this most individual of all historical 
writings. 

"To give Carlyle's method the briefest possible 
definition, were perhaps to say that he strove to 
write history in the study as he would have reported 
it in the street. He relied upon personal memoirs, 
to a degree unusual even in a historian of France. 
While other historians had sought to blend these de- 
tails into a smooth equable narrative, as rags are 
fashioned into a sheet of paper, Carlyle took the 
rags themselves and hung them forth gay or grimy 
or blood-stained, dancing in air or trailing in 
mud. Other historians gave the Revolution at sec- 

121 



122 CARLYLE 

ond-hand, but he at first-hand. That peculiar feel- 
ing of reality, as if one's own blood bounded with 
the emotion of the event, which others have success- 
fully called up in detached scenes, as Schiller in his 
description of the battle of Lutzen, Carlyle excited 
throughout a long history. The secret was his power 
of such thorough identification with the feelings of 
the actors in the occurrences that the reader felt a 
witness, and the witness seemed well-nigh an actor 
in the impassioned drama. 

"This power was not peculiar to Carlyle, it be- 
longs more or less to all poets and novelists who 
excel in the delineation of action. He had, however, 
a great advantage over most poets and novelists in 
his intense penetration with his subject. He wrote 
less as an artist than as a prophet. He believed that 
the French Revolution was the living manifesta- 
tion of the truths he held most dear. The sublim- 
ity of fact, the impotence of phrase, the folly of for- 
mula, the loathsomeness of rotten institutions, the 
reeling frenzy of the unguided multitude, the saving 
virtue of efficiency, that salt of scoundrelism ; these 
things he saw written throughout the whole event- 
ful history. He need not, as in Sartor, spin his ar- 
gument from his own brain, the facts would preach 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 123 

eloquently enough. He was fortunate moreover in 
a subject which exactly fitted his style. Vividness 
is always a precious quality, yet some incongruity 
must have been felt if the tale of ancient Greece or 
modern Italy had been told in the language of The 
French Revolution. Nor could such a style have 
been proper or even practicable where the ele- 
ment of first-hand testimony was less prepondera- 
ting. But the French Revolution was volcanic 
enough to justify Carlylese vehemence of treatment; 
and its archives, whether extant in contemporary 
pamphlets or in memoirs, were the work of those 
who spoke of what they knew and testified of what 
they had seen." 

Carlyle's ethical purpose, in this book, is as in- 
dubitable as his technical performance. It has been 
expounded by Froude in one of his finest chapters 
(Carlyle's Life in London, I. 4) from which we 
may borrow a few sentences : 

". . . Struggling thus in pain and sorrow, he 
desired to tell the modern wor ld that, destitute as it 
and its affairs app eared to be of Divine guidan ce, 
God or justice was still in the middle of it, sternly 
inexorable as ever ; that modern nations were as en- 
tirely governed by God's law as the Israelites had 



124 CARLYLE 

been In Palestine — laws self-acting and Inflicting 
their own penalties, If man neglected or defied them. 
And these laws were substantially the same as those 
on the Tables delivered in thunder on Mount Sinai. 
You shall reverence your Almighty Maker. You 
shall speak the truth. You shall do justice to your 
fellow-man. If you set truth aside for conventional 
and convenient lies; if you prefer your own plea- 
sure, your own will, your own ambition, to purity 
and manliness and justice, and submission to your 
Maker's commands, then are whirlwinds still pro- 
vided in the constitution of things which will blow 
you to atoms. Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, 
were the whips which were provided for the Israel- 
ites. Germans and Huns swept away the Roman 
sensualists. Modern socjety, though out of fear of 
barbarian conquerors, breeds in its o wn heart the 
instruments of its punishment. The hungry and 
injured millions will rise up and bring to justice 
their guilty rulers, themselves little better than those 
whom they throw down, themselves powerless to 
rebuild out of the ruins any abiding city; but pow- 
erful to destroy, powerful to dash in pieces the cor- 
rupt institutions which have been the shelter and the 
instrument of oppression. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 125 

"And Carlyle believed this — believed it singly and 
simply as Isaiah believed it, not as a mode of speech 
to be used in pulpits by eloquent preachers, but as 
actual literal fact, as a real account of the true 
living relations between man and Maker. The es- 
tablished forms, creeds, liturgies, articles of faith, 
were but as the shell round the kernel. The shell in 
these days of ours had rotted away, and men sup- 
posed that, because the shell was gone, the entire 
conception had been but a dream. It was no dream. 
The kernel could not rot. It was the vital force 
by which human existence in this planet was con- 
trolled, and would be controlled to the end." 

To these comments upon the artistic and moral 
intention of The French Revolution little needs to 
be added, except a single caution to the reader. He 
ought, in order to enjoy the book to the full, to know 
the main facts of the Revolution in advance. Car- 
lyle's method requires that the reader shall meet the 
author half-way, — and often more than half-way. 
Carlyle takes for granted that we are already ac- 
quainted with the chief events under consideration. 
He also presupposes that we possess a certain de- 
gree of imaginative power, and that we are willing 
to read d3aiamically and not passively. Unless we 



126 CARLYLE 

are able and willing to conform to such conditions, 
it is useless to approach this masterpiece. 

Perhaps its distinctive qualities are to be most 
clearly grasped in the description of a few events 
and in the characterization of certain persons. 

Death of Louis XV 

"Frightful to all men is Death ; from of old named 
King of Terrors. Our little compact home of an 
Existence, where we dwelt complaining, yet as in a 
home, is passing, in dark agonies, into an Unknown 
of Separation, Foreignness, unconditioned Possibil- 
ity. The Heathen Emperor asks of his soul: Into 
what places art thou now departing ? The Catholic 
King must answer: To the Judgment-bar of the 
Most High God! Yes, it is a summing up of Life; 
a final settling, and giving-in the 'account of the 
deeds done in the body :' they are done now ; and lie 
there unalterable, and do bear their fruits, long as 
Eternity shall last. 

"Louis XV had always the kingliest abhorrence 
of Death. Unlike that praying Duke of Orleans, 
Egalite's grandfather, — for indeed several of them 
had a touch of madness, — who honestly believed 
that there was no Death! He, if the Court News- 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 127 

men can be believed, started up once on a time, 
glowing with sulphurous contempt and indignation 
on his poor Secretary, who had stumbled on the 
words, feu roi d'Espagne (the late King of Spain) : 
'Feu roi, Monsieur?' — 'Monseigneur,' hastily an- 
swered the trembling but adroit man of business, 
'c'est une titre qu'ils prennent ('tis a title they 
take) / Louis, we say, was not so happy ; but he did 
what he could. He would not suffer Death to be 
spoken of; avoided the sight of churchyards, fu- 
nereal monuments, and whatsoever could bring it 
to mind. It is the resource of the Ostrich; who, 
hard hunted, sticks his foolish head in the ground^ 
and would fain forget that his foolish unseeing 
body is not unseen too. Or sometimes, with a spas- 
modic antagonism, significant of the same thing, and 
of more, he would go; or stopping his court car- 
riages, would send into churchyards, and ask *how 
many new graves there were to-day,* though it gave 
his poor Pompadour the disagreeablest qualms. We 
can figure the thought of Louis that day, when, all 
royally caparisoned for hunting, he met, at some 
sudden turning in the Wood of Senart, a ragged 
Peasant with a coffin : *For whom ?' — It was for a 
poor brother slave, whom Majesty had sometimes 



128 CARLYLE 

noticed slaving in those quarters : 'What did he die 
of?' — *0f hunger:' — ^the King gave his steed the 
spur. 

"But figure his thought, when Death is now 
clutching at his own heart-strings; unlooked for, 
inexorable ! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. 
No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries 
or gilt buckram of stiff est ceremonial could keep 
him out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, 
and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole existence 
hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length 
becomest a reality: sumptuous Versailles bursts 
asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity; Time 
is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked 
with hideous clangour round thy soul : the pale King- 
doms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all 
unking'd, and await what is appointed thee! Un- 
happy man, there as thou turnest, in dull agony, on 
thy bed of weariness, what a thought is thine ! Pur- 
gatory and Hell-fire, now all too possible, in the 
prospect: in the retrospect — alas, what thing didst 
thou do that were not better undone; what mortal 
didst thou generously help ; what sorrow hadst thou 
mercy on? Do the *five hundred thousand' ghosts, 
who sank shamefully on so many battle-fields from 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 129 

Rossbach to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take re- 
venge for an epigram, — crowd round thee in this 
hour? Thy foul Harem; the curses of mothers, 
the tears and infamy of daughters ? Miserable man ! 
thou *hast done evil as thou couldst :' thy whole exist- 
ence seems one hideous abortion and mistake of 
Nature; the use and meaning of thee not yet known. 
Wert thou a fabulous Griffin, devouring the works 
of men; daily dragging virgins to thy cave; — clad 
also in scales that no spear would pierce : no spear 
but Death's? A Griffin not fabulous but real! 
Frightful, O Louis, seem these moments for thee. — 
We will pry no further into the horrors of a sin- 
ner's deathbed." 

Fall of the Bastille 

"To describe the Seige of the Bastille (thought to 
be one of the most important in History) perhaps 
transcends the talent of mortals. Could one but, 
after infinite reading, get to understand so much as 
the plan of the building! But there is open Espla* 
nade, at the end of the Rue Saint- Antoine ^ 
there are such Forecourts, Cour Avance, Cour de 
rOrme, arched Gateway (where Louis Tournay 
now; fights )^; then new drawbridges, dormant-^ 



130 CARLYLE 

bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight 
Towers: a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, 
of all ages from twenty years to four hundred and 
twenty; — ^beleaguered, in this its last hour, as we 
said, by mere Chaos come again ! Ordnance of all 
calibres; throats of all capacities; men of all plans, 
every man his own engineer : seldom since the war 
of Pygmies and Cranes was there seen so anom- 
alous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home for a suit 
of regimentals ; no one would heed him in coloured 
clothes : half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Fran- 
daises in the Place de Greve. Frantic Patriots pick 
up the grapeshots; bear them, still hot (or seem- 
ingly so), to the H6tel-de-Ville : — Paris, you per- 
ceive, is to be burnt ! Flesselles is 'pale to the very 
lips,' for the roar of the multitude grows deep. 
Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; 
whirled, all ways, by panic madness. At every street 
barricade, there whirls simmering a minor whirl- 
pool, — strengthening the barricade, since God knows 
what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play dis- 
tractedly into that grand Fire-Mahlstrom which is 
lashing round the Bastille. 

"And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine- 
.merchant has become an impromptu cannoneer. See 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 131 

Georget, of the Marine Service, fresh from Brest, 
ply the King of Siam's cannon. Singular (if we 
were not used to the like) : Georget lay, last night, 
taking his ease at his inn ; the King of Siam's cannon 
also lay, knowing nothing of hintj for a hundred 
years. Yet now at the right instant, they have got 
together, and discourse eloquent music. For, hear- 
ing what was toward, Georget sprang from the 
Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Frangaises also 
will be here, with real artillery : were not the walls 
so thick! — ^Upwards from the Esplanade, horizon- 
tally from all neighbouring roofs and windows, 
flashes one irregular deluge of musketry, without 
effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively 
at their ease from behind stone; hardly through 
portholes, show the tip of a nose. We fall, shot; 
and make no impression ! 

"Let conflagrations rage; of whatsoever is com- 
bustible! Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess- 
rooms. A distracted Teruke-maker with two fiery 
torches' is for burning 'the saltpetres of the Ar- 
senal;' — had not a woman run screaming; had not 
a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, 
instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of mus- 
ket on pit of stomach), overturned barrels, and 



132 CARLYLE 

stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful 
lady, seized escaping in these Outer Courts, and 
thought falsely to be De Launay's daughter, shall be 
burnt in De Launay^s sight; she lies swooned on a 
paillasse : but again a Patriot, it is brave Aubin Bon- 
nemere the old soldier, dashes in, and rescues her. 
Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled thither, 
go up in white smoke: almost to the choking of 
Patriotism itself; so that Elie had, with singed 
brows, to drag back one cart ; and Reole, the 'gi- 
gantic haberdasher' another. Smoke as of Tophet; 
confusion as of Babel; noise as of the Crack of 
Doom ! 

"Blood flows; the aliment of new madness. The 
jvounded are carried into houses of the Rue Ceri- 
saie ; the dying leave their last mandate not to yield 
till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas, 
how fall? The walls are so thick! Deputations, 
three in number, arrive from the H6tel-de-Ville ; 
Abbe Fauchet (who was of one) can say, with what 
almost superhuman courage of benevolence. These 
wave their Town-flag in the arched Gateway; and 
stand, rolling their drum; but to no purpose. In 
such Crack of Doom, De Launay can not hear 
them, dare not believe them: they return^ with justi- 



,THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 133 

fied rage, the whew of lead still singing in their ears. 
What to do ? The Firemen are here, squirting with 
their fire-pumps on the Invalides cannon, to wet 
the touchholes; they unfortunately can not squirt so 
high ; but produce only clouds of spray. Individuals 
of classical knowledge propose catapults, Santerre, 
the sonorous Brewer of the Suburb Saint- Antoine, 
advises rather that the place be fired, by a 'mixture 
of phosphorous and oil-of -turpentine spouted up 
through forcing pumps :* O Spinola-Santerre, hast 
thou the mixture ready f Every man his own en- 
gineer! And still the fire-deluge abates not: even 
women are firing, and Turks; at least one woman 
(with her sweetheart) and one Turk. Gardes 
Franqaises have come : real cannon, real cannoneers. 
Usher Maillard is busy; half-pay Elie, half-pay 
Hulin rage in the midst of thousands. 

"How the great Bastille Clock ticks (inaudible) 
in its Inner Court there, at its ease, hour after hour; 
as if nothing special, for it or the world, were pass- 
ing! It tolled One when the firing began; and is 
now pointing towards Five, and still the firing 
slakes not. — Far down, in their vaults, the seven 
Prisoners hear muffled din as of earthquakes; their 
Turnkeys answer vaguely. 



134 CARLYLE 

".Wo to thee, De Launay, with thy poor hundred 
Invalides! Broglie is distant, and his ears heavy: 
Besenval hears, but can send no help. One poor 
troop of Hussars has crept, reconnoitering, cau- 
tiously along the Quais, as far as the Pont Neuf. 
*We are come to join you,' said the Captain; for 
the crowd seems shoreless. A large-headed dwarf- 
ish individual, of smoke-bleared aspect, shambles 
forward, opening his blue lips, for there is sense in 
him; and croaks: 'Alight then, and give up your 
armsT The Hussar-Captain is too happy to be 
escorted to the Barriers, and dismissed on parole. 
Who the squat individual was? Men answer. It 
is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific Avis au 
Peuple! Great truly, O thou remarkable Dog- 
leech, is this thy day of emergence and new-birth; 

and yet this same day come four years ! — ^But 

let the curtains of the Future hang. 

"What shall De Launay do ? One thing only De 
Launay could have done : what he said he would do. 
Fancy him sitting, from the first with lighted taper, 
within arm's length of the Powder-Magazine ; mo- 
tionless, like old Roman Senator, or Bronze Lamp- 
holder; coldly apprising Thuriot, and all men, by 
a slight motion of his eye, what his resolution was : 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 135 

—Harmless he sat there, while unharmed; but the 
King's Fortress, meanwhile, could, might, would, or 
should, in nowise be surrendered, save to the King's 
Messenger: one old man's life is worthless, so it be 
lost with honour; but think, ye brawling canaille, 
how it will be when a whole Bastille springs sky- 
ward!— In such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, 
one fancies De Launay might have left Thuriot, the 
red Clerks of the Basoche, Cure of Saint-Stephen 
and all the tag-rag-and-bobtail of the world, to work 

their will. 

"And yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou 
considered how each man's heart is so tremulously 
responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted 
how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? 
How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong 
soul; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt 
pangs? The Ritter Gluck confessed that the ground- 
tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest 
Operas, was the voice of the Populace he had heard 
at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread! 
Great is the combined voice of men; the utterance 
of their instincts which are truer than their thoughts: 
it is the greatest a man encounters, among the 
sounds and shadows which make up this World of 



136 CARLYLE 

Time. He who can resist that, has his footing 
somewhere beyond Time. De Launay could not do 
it. Distracted, he hovers between two; hopes in 
the middle of despair; surrenders not his Fortress; 
declares that he will blow it up, seizes torches to 
'blow it up, and does not blow it. Unhappy old De 
Launay, it is the death-agony of thy Bastille and 
^thee! Jail, Jalloring and Jailor, all three, such as 
they may have been, must finish. 

"For four hours now has the World-Bedlam 
roared: call it the World-Chimsera, blowing fire! 
The poor Invalides have sunk their battlements, or 
rise only with reversed muskets : they have made a 
white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, or 
seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The 
very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary of firing; 
disheartened in the fire-deluge: a porthole at the 
drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. 
See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his 
plank, swinging over the abyss of that stone Ditch; 
plank resting on a parapet, balanced by weight of 
Patriots, — ^he hovers perilous: such a Dove to- 
wards such an Ark ! Deftly, thou shifty Usher : one 
man already fell ; and lies smashed, far down there, 
against the masonry; Usher Maillard falls not: 



JHE FRENCH REVOLUTION 137 

3e£tly, unerring he walks, with outspread palm. The 
Swiss holds a paper through his porthole; the shifty 
Usher snatches it, and returns. Terms of surrender : 
Pardon, immunity to all ! Are they accepted ? — *Foi 
d'officier. On the word of an officer,' answers half- 
pay Hulin, — or half -pay Elie, for men do not agree 
on it, 'they are!* Sinks the drawbridge, — -Usher 
Maillard bolting it when down ; rushes-in the living 
deluge : the Bastille is fallen! Victoire! La Bastille 
est prise! 

Execution of Louis XVI 

"To this conclusion, then, hast thou come, O hap- 
less Louis! The Son of Sixty Kings is to die on 
the Scaffold by form of Law. Under Sixty Kings 
this same form of Law, form of Society, has been 
fashioning itself together, these thousand years; 
and has become, one way and other, a most strange 
Machine. Surely, if needful, it is also frightful, this 
Machine ; dead, blind ; not what it should be ; which, 
>vith swift stroke, or by cold slow torture, has wasted 
the lives and souls of innumerable men. And be- 
hold now a King himself, or say rather Knighthood 
in his person, is to expire here in cruel tortures; — 
like a Phalaris shut m the belly of his own red- 



138 CARLYLE 

heated Brazen Bull ! It is ever so ; and thou shouldst 
know it, O haughty tyrannous man : injustice breeds 
injustice; curses and falsehoods do verily return 'al- 
ways home' wide as they may wander. Innocent 
Louis bears the sins of many generations: he too 
experiences that man's tribunal is not in this Earth ; 
that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with 
him. 

"A King dying by such violence appeals impres- 
sively to the imagination; as the like must do, and 
ought to do. And yet at bottom it is not the King 
dying, but the man 1 Kingship is a coat : the grand 
loss is of the skin. The man from whom you take 
his Life, to him can the whole combined world do 
more? Lally went on his hurdle; his mouth filled 
with a gag. Miserablest mortals, doomed for pick- 
ing pockets, have a whole five-act Tragedy in them, 
in that dumb pain, as they go to the gallows, unre- 
garded; they consume the cup of trembling down to 
the lees. For Kings and for Beggars, for the justly 
doomed and the unjustly, it is a hard thing to die. 
Pity them all : thy utmost pity, with all aids and ap- 
pliances and throne-and-scaffold contrasts, how; far 
short is it of the thing pitied! 

"A Confessor has come; Abbe Edgeworth, of 



JRE FRENCH REVOLUTION 139 

Irish extraction, whom the King knew by good re- 
port, has come promptly on this solemn mission. 
Leave the Earth alone, then, thou hapless King; it 
with its malice will go its way, thou also canst go 
thine. A hard scene yet remains : the parting with 
our loved ones. Kind hearts, environed in the same 
grim peril with us ; to be left here ! Let the Reader 
look with the eyes of Valet Clery, through these 
glass-doors, where also the Municipality watches; 
and see the cruellest of scenes : 

" *At half -past eight, the door of the ante-room 
opened: the Queen appeared first, leading her Son 
by the hand; then Madame Royale and Madame 
Elizabeth: they all flung themselves into the arms 
of the King. Silence reigned for some minutes : in- 
terrupted only by sobs. The Queen made a move- 
ment to lead his Majesty towards the inner room, 
where M. Edgeworth was waiting unknown to them : 
*No,' said the King, *let us go into the dining- 
room, it is there only that I can see you.' They 
entered there; I shut the door of it, which was of 
glass. The King sat down, the Queen on his left 
hand, Madame Elizabeth on his right, Madame 
Royale almost in front ; the young Prince remained 
standing between his Father's legs. They all leaned 



140 CARLYLE 

towards him, and often held him embraced. This 
scene of woe lasted an hour and three-quarters ; dur- 
ing which we could hear nothing ; we could see only 
that always when the King spoke, the sobbings of the 
Princesses redoubled, continued for some minutes; 
and that then the King began again to speak.' — ^And 
so our meetings and our partings do now end ! The 
sorrows we gave each other; the poor joys we 
faithfully shared, and all our lovings and our suffer- 
ings, and confused toilings under the earthly Sun, 
are over. Thou good soul, I shall never, never 
through all ages of Time, see thee any more! — 
Never! O Reader, knowest thou that hard word? 

"For nearly two hours this agony lasts ; then they 
tear themselves asunder. 'Promise that you will see 
us on the morrow.' He promises: — Ah yes, yes; 
yet once; and go now, ye loved ones; cry to God 
for yourselves and me! — It was a hard scene, but 
it is over. He will not see them on the morrow. The 
Queen, in passing through the ante-room, glanced 
at the Cerberus Municipals ; and, with woman's ve- 
hemence, said through her tears, 'Vous etes tons des 
scelerats/ 

"King Louis slept sound, till five in the morning, 
when Clery, as he had been ordered, awoke him. 



JHE FRENCH REVOLUTION 141 

Clery dressed his hair: while this went forward, 
Louis took a ring from his watch, and kept trying 
it on his finger; it was his wedding-ring, which he 
is now to return to the Queen as a mute farewell. At 
half -past six, he took the Sacrament; and continued 
in devotion, and conference with Abbe Edgeworth. 
He will not see his Family : it were too hard to bear. 
"At eight, the Municipals enter: the King gives 
them his Will, and messages and effects ; which they, 
at first, brutally refuse to take charge of : he gives 
them a roll of gold pieces, a hundred and twenty- 
five louis; these are to be returned to Malesherbes, 
who had lent them. At nine, Santerre says the hour 
is come. The King begs yet to retire for three 
minutes. At the end of three minutes, Santerre 
again says the hour is come. 'Stamping on the 
ground with his right- foot, Louis answers: *' Par^ 
tons, Let us go." '■ — How the rolling of those drums 
comes in, through the Temple bastions and bulwarks, 
on the heart of a queenly wife ; soon to be a widow ! 
He is gone, then, and has not seen us? A Queen 
weeps bitterly ; a King's Sister and Children. Over 
all these Four does Death also hover : all shall per- 
ish miserably save one; she, as Duchesse d'Angou- 
, leme, will liv-e, — not happily. 



142 CARLYLE 

"At the Temple Gate were some faint cries, per- 
haps from voices of pitiful women: * Grace! Grace!' 
through the rest of the streets there is silence as of 
the grave. No man not armed is allowed to be there : 
the armed, did any even pity, dare not express it, 
each man overawed by all his neighbours. All win- 
dows are down, none seen looking through them. 
All shops are shut. No wheel-carriage rolls, this 
morning, in these streets but one only. Eighty- 
thousand armed men stand ranked, like armed 
statues of men; cannons bristle, cannoneers witK 
match burning, but no word or movement : it is as 
a city enchanted into silence and stone ; one carriage 
with its escort, slowly rumbling, is the only sound. 
Louis reads, in his Book of Devotion, the Prayers 
of the Dying : clatter of this death-march falls sharp 
on the ear, in the great silence, but the thought 
would fain struggle heavenward, and forget the 
Earth. 

"As the clocks strike ten, behold the Place de la 
Revolution, once Place de Louis Quinze : the Guillo- 
tine, mounted near the old Pedestal where once 
stood the Statue of that Louis ! Far round, all bris- 
tles with cannons and armed men : spectators crowd- 
ing in the rear; D'Orleans Egalite there in cabriolet. 



JHE FRENCH REVOLUTION 143 

Swift messengers, hoquetons, speed to the Townhall, 
every three minutes : near by is the Convention sit- 
ting, — ^vengeful for Lepelletier. Heedless of all, 
Louis reads his Prayers of the Dying; not till five 
minutes yet has he finished ; then the Carriage opens. 
What temper he is in ? Ten different v^itnesses will 
give ten different accounts of it. He is in the colli- 
sion of all tempers; arrived now at the black Mahl- 
strom and descent of Death : in sorrow, in indigna- 
tion, in resignation struggling to be resigned. *Take 
care of M. Edgeworth,' he straitly charges the Lieu- 
tenant who is sitting with them : then they two de- 
scend. 

"The drums are beating: 'Taisez-vous, Silence!' 
he cries *in a terrible voice, d'une voix terrible* He 
mounts the scaffold, not without delay ; he is in puce 
coat, breeches of gray, white stockings. He strips 
off the coat; stands disclosed in a sleeve-waistcoat 
of white flannel. The Executioners approach to 
bind him : he spurns, resists ; Abbe Edgeworth has to 
remind him how the Saviour, in whom men trust, 
submitted to be bound. His hands are tied, his head 
bare; the fatal moment is come. He advances to 
the edge of the Scaffold, 'his face very red,' and 
says: 'Frenchmen, I die innocent: it is from this 



144 CARLYLE 

Scaffold and near appearing before God that I tell 
you so. I pardon my enemies; I desire that 

France ' A General on horseback, Santerre or 

another, prances out, with uplifted hand: * Tam- 
bours!' The drums drown the voice. 'Executioners, 
do your duty!' The Executioners, desperate lest 
themselves be murdered (for Santerre and his 
Armed Ranks will strike, if they do not), seize the 
hapless Louis: six of them desperate, him singly 
desperate, struggling there; and bind him to their 
plank. Abbe Edgeworth, stooping, bespeaks him: 
^Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven.' The Axe 
clanks down; a King's Life is shorn away. It is 
Monday the 21st of January, 1793. He was aged 
Thirty-eight years four months and twenty-eight 
days. 

"Executioner Samson shows the Head ; fierce shout 
of Vive la Republique rises, and swells ; caps raised 
on bayonets, hats waving: students of the College 
of Four Nations take it up, on the far Quais; fling 
it over Paris. D' Orleans drives off in his cabriolet : 
the Townhall Councillors rub their hands, saying, 
Tt is done, It is done.' There is dipping of handker- 
chiefs, of pike-points in the blood. Headsman 
Samson, though he afterwards denied it, sells locks 



JHE FRENCH REVOLUTION 145 

of the hair : fractions of the puce coat are long after 
worn in rings. — And so, in some half -hour it is 
done; and the multitude has all departed. Pastry- 
cooks, coffee-sellers, milkmen sing out their trivial 
quotidian cries : the world wags on, as if this were 
a common day. In the coffeehouses that evening, 
says Prudhomme, Patriot shook hands with Patriot 
in a more cordial manner than usual. Not till some 
days after, according to Mercier, did public men 
see what a grave thing it was." 

Charlotte Cor day 

"Amid which dim ferment of Caen and the World, 
History specially notices one thing: in the lobby of 
the Mansion de VIntendance, where busy Deputies 
are coming and going, a young Lady with an aged 
valet, taking grave graceful leave of Deputy Bar- 
baroux. She is of stately Norman figure; in her 
twenty-fifth year; of beautiful still countenance : her 
name is Charlotte Corday, heretofore styled D'Ar- 
mans, while Nobility still was. Barbaroux has given 
her a Note to Deputy Duperret, — him who once 
drew his sword in the effervescence. Apparently 
she will to Paris on some errand? *She was a Re- 
publican before the Revolution, and never wanted 



146 CARLYLE 

energy/ A completeness, a decision is in this fair 
female Figure : 'by energy she means the spirit that 
will prompt one to sacrifice himself for his country.' 
What if she, this fair young Charlotte, had emerged 
from her secluded stillness, suddenly like a Star; 
cruel-lovely, with half -angelic, half -daemonic splen- 
dour; to gleam for a moment, and in a moment be 
extinguished : to be held in memory, so bright com- 
plete was she, through long centuries! — Quitting 
Cimmerian Coalitions without, and the dim-simmer- 
ing Twenty-five millions within. History will look 
fixedly at this one fair Apparition of a Charlotte 
Corday ; will note whither Charlotte moves, how the 
little Life burns forth so radiant, then vanishes 
swallowed of the Night. 

"With Barbaroux's Note of Introduction, and 
slight stock of luggage, we see Charlotte on Tues- 
day the ninth of July seated in the Caen Diligence, 
with a place for Paris. None takes farewell of her, 
wishes her Good-journey : her Father will find a 
line left, signifying that she is gone to England, 
that he must pardon her, and forget her. The drowsy 
Diligence lumbers along; amid drowsy talk of Poli- 
tics, and praise of the Mountain; in which she min- 
gles not : all night, all day, and again all night. On 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 147, 

Thursday, not long before noon, we are at the bridge 
of Neuilly; here is Paris with her thousand black 
domes, the goal and purpose of thy journey ! Ar- 
rived at the Inn de la Providence in the Rue des 
Vieux Augustins, Charlotte demands a room; has- 
tens to bed; sleeps all afternoon and night, till the 
morrow morning. 

"On the morrow morning, she delivers her Note 
to Duperret. It relates to certain Family Papers 
which are in the Minister of the Interior's hand; 
which a Nun at Caen, an old Convent-friend of 
Charlotte's, has need of; which Duperret shall assist 
her in getting: this then was Charlotte's errand to 
Paris? She has finished this, in the course of Fri- 
day; — yet says nothing of returning. She has seen 
and silently investigated several things. The Con- 
vention, in bodily reality, she has seen; what the 
Mountain is like. The living physiognomy of Ma- 
rat she could not see ; he is sick at present, and con- 
fined to home. 

"About eight on the Saturday morning, she pur- 
chases a large sheath-knife in the Palais Royal; then 
straightway, in the Place des Victoires, takes a 
hackney-coach : To the Rue de I'Ecole de Medecine, 
No. 44/ It is the residence of the Citoyen Marat! 



148 CARLYLE 

— The Citoyen Marat is ill, and can not be seen; 
which seems to disappoint her much. Her business 
is with Marat, then? Hapless beautiful Charlotte; 
hapless squalid Marat! From Caen in the utmost 
West, from Neuchatel in the utmost East, they two 
are drawing nigh each other; they two have, very 
strangely, business together. — Charlotte, returning 
to her Inn, despatches a short Note to Marat; sig- 
nifying that she is from Caen, the seat of rebel- 
lion ; that she desires earnestly to see him, and 'will 
put it in his power to do France a great service.* 
No answer. Charlotte writes another Note, still 
more pressing ; sets out with it by coach, about seven 
in the evening, herself. Tired day-labourers have 
again finished their Week; huge Paris is circling 
and simmering, manifold, according to its vague 
wont : this one fair Figure has decision in it ; drives 
straight, — towards a purpose. 

"It is yellow July evening, we say, the thirteenth 
of the month: eve of the Bastille day, — when *M. 
Marat,' four years ago, in the crowd of the Pont 
Neuf, shrewdly required of that Besenval Hussar- 
party, which had such friendly dispositions, *to dis- 
mount, and give up their arms, then;* and became 
notable among Patriot men. Four years: what a 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 149 

road he has travelled; — and sits now, about half- 
past seven of the clock, stewing in slipper-bath; sore 
afflicted; ill of Revolution Fever, — of what other 
malady this History had rather not name. Ex- 
cessively sick and worn, poor man: with precisely 
eleven-pence-halfpenny of ready money, in paper; 
with slipper-bath; strong three- footed stool for writ- 
ing on, the while; and a squalid — Washerwoman, 
one may call her : that is his civic establishment in 
Medical-School Street; thither and not elsewhither 
has his road led him. Not to the reign of Brother- 
hood and Perfect Felicity; yet surely on the way to- 
wards that? — Hark, a rap again! A musical 
woman's voice, refusing to be rejected: it is the 
Citoyenne who would do France a service. Marat, 
recognising from within, cries. Admit her. Charlotte 
Corday is admitted. 

*'Citoyen Marat, I am from Caen the seat of re- 
bellion, and wished to speak with you. — Be seated, 
mon enfant. Now what are the Traitors doing at 
Caen? What Deputies are at Caen? — Charlotte 
names some Deputies. 'Their heads shall fall within 
a fortnight,' croaks the eager People's-friend, clutch- 
ing his tablets to write : Barharoux, Petion, writes 
he with bare shrunk arm, turning aside in the bath : 



150 CARLYLE 

Petion, and Louvei, and — Charlotte has drawn her 
knife from the sheath; plunges it, with one sure 
stroke, into the writer's heart. 'A moi, chere amie. 
Help, dear !' no more could the Death-choked say or 
shriek. The helpful Washerwoman running in, 
there is no Friend of the People, or Friend of the 
Washerwoman left; but his life with a groan 
gushes out, indignant, to the shades below. 

"And so Marat People's-friend is ended; the 
lone Stylites has got hurled down suddenly from 
his Pillar — whitherward He that made him knows. 
Patriot Paris may sound triple and tenfold, in dole 
and wail ; re-echoed by Patriot France ; and the Con- 
vention, 'Chabot pale with terror, declaring that 
they are to be all assassinated,' may decree him Pan- 
theon Honours, Public Funeral, Mirabeau's dust 
making way for him; and Jacobin Societies, in la- 
mentable oratory, summing up his character, paral- 
lel him to One, whom they think it honour to call 
'the good Sansculotte,' — whom we name not here; 
also a Chapel may be made, for the urn that holds 
his Heart, in the Place du Carrousel ; and new-born 
children be named Marat; and Lago-di-Como 
Hawkers bake mountains of stucco into unbeautiful 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 151 

Busts; and David paint his Picture, or Death- 
Scene; and such other Apotheosis take place as the 
human genius, in these circumstances, can devise: 
but Marat returns no more to the light of this Sun. 
One sole circumstance we have read with clear sym- 
pathy, in the old Moniteur Newspaper : how Marat's 
Brother comes from Neuchatel to ask of the Con- 
vention, 'that the deceased Jean-Paul Marat's mus- 
ket be given him.' For Marat too had a brother, and 
natural affections ; and was wrapt once in swaddling- 
clothes, and slept safe in a cradle like the rest of us. 
Ye children of men! — a sister of his, they say, lives 
still to this day in Paris. 

"As for Charlotte Corday, her work is accom- 
plished; the recompense of it is near and sure. The 
chere amie, and neighbours of the house, flying at 
her, she 'overturns some movables/ entrenches her- 
self till the gendarmes arrive; then quietly surren- 
ders ; goes quietly to the Abbaye Prison : she alone 
quiet, all Paris sounding, in wonder, in rage or ad- 
miration, round her. Duperret is put in arrest, on 
account of her; his Papers sealed, — which may lead 
to consequences. Fauchet, in like manner; though 
Fauchet had not so much as heard of her. Charlotte, 



152 CARLYLE 

confronted with these two Deputies, praises the 
grave firmness of Duperret, censures the dejection 
of Fauchet. 

"On Wednesday morning, the thronged Palais 
de Justice and Revolutionary Tribunal can see her 
face; beautitful and calm: she dates it 'fourth day 
of the Preparation of Peace.' A strange murmur 
ran through the Hall, at sight of her; you could not 
say of what character. Tinville has his indictments 
and tape-papers : the cutler of the Palais Royal will 
testify that he sold her the sheath-knife; 'All these 
details are needless,' interrupted Charlotte; *it is I 
that killed Marat.' By whose instigation? — 'By no 
one's.' What tempted you, then? His crimes. 'I 
killed one man,' added she, raising her voice ex- 
tremely {extremement) y as they went on with their 
questions, *I killed one man to save a hundred thou- 
sand; a villain to save innocents; a savage wild- 
beast to give repose to my country. I was a Repub- 
lican before the Revolution; I never wanted energy.' 
There is therefore nothing to be said. The public 
gazes astonished: the hasty limners sketch her 
features, Charlotte not disapproving : the men of law 
proceed with their formalities. The doom is Death 
as a murderess. To her Advocate she gives thanks ; 



JHE FRENCH REVOLUTION 153 

in gentle phrase, in high-flown classical spirit. To 
the Priest they send her she gives thanks ; but needs 
not any shriving, any ghostly or other aid from him. 
"On this same evening therefore, about half -past 
seven o'clock, from the gate of the Conciergerie, to 
a City all on tiptoe, the fatal Cart issues ; seated on 
it a fair young creature, sheeted in red smock of 
Murderess; so beautiful, serene, so full of life; jour- 
neying towards death, — alone amid the World. 
Many take off their hats, saluting reverently; for 
what heart but must be touched ? Others growl and 
howl. Adam Lux, of Mentz, declares that she is 
greater than Brutus; that it were beautiful to die 
with her : the head of this young man seems turned. 
At the Place de la Revolution, the countenance of 
Charlotte wears the same still smile. The execu- 
tioners proceed to bind her feet; she resists, think- 
ing it meant as an insult; on a word of explanation, 
she submits with cheerful apology. As the last act, 
all being now ready, they take the neckerchief from 
her neck; a blush of maidenly shame overspreads 
that fair face and neck; the cheeks were still tinged 
with it when the executioner lifted the severed head, 
to show it to the people. Tt is most true,' says For- 
ster, 'that he struck the cheek insultingly; for I saw 



154 CARLYLE 

it with my eyes : the PoHce imprisoned him for it.' 
"In this manner have the Beauti fullest and the 
Squalidest come in collision, and extinguished one 
another. Jean-Paul Marat and Marie- Anne Char- 
lotte Cor day both, suddenly, are no more. *Day of 
the Preparation of Peace?' Alas, how were peace 
possible or preparable, while, for example, the hearts 
of lovely Maidens, in their convent-stillness, are 
dreaming not of Love-paradises, and the light of 
Life; but of Codrus'-sacrifices, and Death well- 
earned? That Twenty-five million hearts have got 
to such temper, this is the Anarchy; the soul of it 
lies in this: whereof not peace can be the embodi- 
ment ! The death of Marat, whetting old animosities 
tenfold, will be worse than any life. O ye hapless 
Two, mutually extinctive, the Beautiful and the 
Squalid, sleep ye well, — in the Mother's bosom that 
bore you both ! j 

"This is the History of Charlotte Corday; most 
definite, most complete; angelic-daemonic: like a 
Starr 

The Whiff of Gr ape-Shot 

"The Convention, driven such a course by wild 
>vind, wild tide and steerage and non-steerage, these 



JHE FRENCH REVOLUTION 155 

three years, has become weary of its own existence, 
sees all men weary of it; and wishes heartily to 
finish. To the last, it has to strive with contradic- 
tions : it is now getting fast ready with a Constitu- 
tion, yet knows no peace. Sieyes, we say, is making 
the Constitution once more ; has as good as made it. 
Warned by experience, the great Architect alters 
much, admits much. Distinction of Active and Pass- 
ive Citizen that is. Money-qualification for Electors : 
nay Two Chambers, 'Council of Ancients,' as well as 
'Council of Five-hundred;' to that conclusion have 
we come! In a like spirit, eschewing that fatal 
self-denying ordinance of your Old Constituents, we 
enact not only that actual Convention Members are 
re-eligible, but that Two-thirds of them must be re- 
elected. The Active Citizen Electors shall for this 
time have free choice of only One-third of their 
National Assembly. Such enactment, of Two-thirds 
to be re-elected, we append to our Constitution ; we 
submit our Constitution to the Townships of France, 
and say, Accept both, or reject both. Unsavoury as 
this appendix may be, the Townships, by overwhelm- 
ing majority, accept and ratify. With Directory of 
Five: jvith Two good Chambers, double-majority 
of thern nominated by ourselves, one hopes this Con- 



156 CARLYLE 

stitution may prove final. March it will ; for the legs 
of it, the re-elected Two-thirds, are already here, 
able to march. Sieyes looks at his paper- fabric with 
just pride. 

"But now see how the contumacious Sections, Le- 
pelletier foremost, kick against the pricks! Is it 
not manifest infraction of one's Elective Franchise, 
Rights of Man, and Sovereignty of the People, this 
appendix of re-electing your Two-thirds? Greedy 
tyrants who would perpetuate yourselves ! — For the 
truth is, victory over Saint- Antoine, and long right 
of Insurrection, has spoiled these men. Nay spoiled 
all men. Consider too how each man was free to 
hope what he liked; and now there is to be no hope, 
there is to be fruition, fruition of this, . . . 

"The convention has some Five-thousand reg- 
ular troops at hand; Generals in abundance; and a 
Fifteen-hundred of miscellaneous persecuted Ultra- 
Jacobins, whom in this crisis it has hastily got to- 
gether and armed, under the title Patriots of Eighty' 
nine. Strong in Law, it sends its General Menou to 
disarm Lepelletier. 

"General Menou marches accordingly, with due 
summons and demonstration; with no result. Gen- 



JHE FRENCH REVOLUTION 157 

eral Menou, about eight in the evening, finds that he 
is standing ranked in the Rue Vivienne, emitting 
vain summonses ; with primed guns pointed out of 
every window at him ; and that he can not disarm 
Lepelletier. He has to return, with whole skin, but 
without success; and be thrown into arrest, as 'a 
traitor/ Whereupon the whole Forty-thousand join 
this Lepelletier which can not be vanquished: to 
what hand shall a quaking Convention now turn? 
Our poor Convention, after such voyaging, just en- 
tering harbour, so to speak, has struck on the bar; — 
and labours there frightfully, with breakers roaring 
round it. Forty-thousand of them, like to wash it, 
and its Sieyes Cargo and the whole future of France, 
into the deep ! Yet one last time, it struggles, ready 
to perish. 

"Some call for Barras to be made Commandant; 
he conquered in Thermidor. Some, what is more 
to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen Buona- 
parte, unemployed Artillery-Officer, who took Tou- 
lon. A man of head, a man of action : Barras is 
named Commandant' s-Cloak ; this young Artillery- 
Officer is named Commandant. He was in the Gal- 
lery at the moment, and heard it : he withdrew, some 



158 CARLYLE 

half-hour, to consider with himself: after a half- 
hour of grim compressed considering, to be or not 
to be, he answers Yea. 

"And now, a man of head being at the centre of 
it, the whole matter gets vital. Swift, to Camp of 
Sablons ; to secure the Artillery, there are not twenty- 
men guarding it! A swift Adjutant, Murat is the 
name of him, gallops; gets thither some minutes 
within time, for Lepelletier was also on march that 
way : the Cannon are ours. And now beset this post, 
and beset that; rapid and firm: at Wicket of the 
Louvre, in Cul-de-sac Dauphin, in Rue Saint-Ho- 
nore, from Pont-Neuf all along the north Quays 
southward to Pont ci-devant Royal, — rank round 
the Sanctuary of the Tuileries, a ring of steel dis- 
cipline; let every gunner have his match burning, 
and all men stand to their arms ! 

"Thus there is Permanent-session through the 
night; and thus at sunrise of the morrow, there is 
seen sacred Insurrection once again : vessel of State 
labouring on the bar; and tumultuous sea all round 
her, beating generale, arming and sounding, — not 
ringing tocsin, for we have left no tocsin but our 
own in the Pavilion of Unity. It is an imminence 
of shipwreck, for the whole world to gaze at. 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 159 

Frightfully she labours, that poor ship, within 
cable-length of port; huge peril for her. However, 
she has a man at the helm. Insurgent messages, re- 
ceived and not received; messenger admitted blind- 
folded ; counsel and counter-counsel : the poor ship 
labours! — Vendemiaire 13th, year 4: curious 
enough, of all days, it is the Fifth day of October, 
anniversary of that Menad-march, six years ago; by 
sacred right of Insurrection we are got thus far. 

"Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint-Roch; 
has seized the Pont-Neuf, our piquet there retreat- 
ing without fire. Stray shots fall from Lepelletier ; 
rattle down on the very Tuileries Staircase. On the 
other hand, women advance dishevelled, shrieking. 
Peace ; Lepelletier behind them waving its hat in sign 
that we shall fraternise. Steady! The Artillery- 
Officer is steady as bronze; can, if need were, be 
quick as lightning. He sends eight-hundred muskets 
with ball-cartridges to the Convention itself; hon- 
ourable Members shall act with these in case of ex- 
tremity: whereat they look grave enough. Four 
of the afternoon is struck. Lepelletier, making 
nothing by messengers, by fraternity or hat-waving, 
bursts out, along the Southern Quai Voltaire, along 
streets and passages, treble-quick in huge veritable 



160 CARLYLE 

onslaught ! Whereupon, thou bronze Artillery-Offi- 
cer — ? Tire!' say the bronze lips. And roar and 
thunder, roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like, 
goes his great gun, in the Cul-de-sac Dauphin 
against the Church of Saint-Roch; go his great guns 
on the Pont-Royal ; go all his great guns ; — ^blow to 
air some two-hundred men, mainly about the Church 
of Saint-Roch! Lepelletier can not stand such 
horse-play; no Sectioner can stand it; the Forty- 
thousand yield on all sides, scour towards covert. 
'Some hundred or so of them, gathered about the 
Theatre de la Republique ; but,' says he, *a few shells 
dislodged them. It was all finished at six/ 

"The Ship is over the bar, then ; free she bounds 
shoreward, — amid shouting and vivats! Citoyen 
Buonaparte is 'named General of the Interior, by ac- 
clamation;' quelled Sections have to disarm in such 
humour as they may; sacred right of Insurrection 
is gone forever! The Sieyes Constitution can dis- 
embark itself, and begin marching. The miraculous 
Convention Ship has got to land; — and is there, 
shall we figuratively say, changed, as Epic Ships are 
wont, into a kind of Sea Nymph, never to sail more; 
to roam the waste Azure, a Miracle in History ! 

" Tt is false,' says Napoleon, 'that we fired first 



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 161 

with blank charge; it had been a waste of Hfe to do 
that.' Most false : the firing was with sharp and 
sharpest shot : to all men it was plain that here was 
no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch 
Church show splintered by it to this hour. — Sin- 
gular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this 
Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but It could not 
be given then; could not have profited then. Now, 
however, the time is come for it, and the man ; and 
behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically 
call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and 
become a thing that was ! — " 



CHAPTER XII 



CHARTISM 



AN adequate discussion of Carlyle's relation to 
j\ English Radicalism is impossible here, but 
no reader of Carlyle should overlook the striking 
pamphlet, written in 1839 and published in 1840, in 
which the historian of the French Revolution at- 
tempted to point out what was wrong with the Eng- 
land of his own day. As early as 1819 Carlyle had 
betrayed strong social sympathy with the Radical 
position; later he had hoped to be editor of the Rad- 
ical London Review (afterward the London and 
Westminster) which was controlled toward the end 
of its career by John Stuart Mill. But Carlyle, who 
was neither Whig nor Tory, and apparently never 
cast a ballot in his life, found it impossible to work 
in harmony with political Radicalism. He attended 
two or three Radical meetings, early in his London 
life, but without giving his intellectual assent; and 
there was an indestructible "respectability" in this 

162 



CHARTISM 163 

Scotchman which made him rebel against the per- 
sonal character of many Radical leaders. ''Radical 
houses," he reports in one of his letters, "are little 
hells of improvidence, discord and unreason." 

,The point to be emphasized is Carlyle's burning 
sympathy with the poor. His distrust of contem- 
porary Literary Philosophical and Parliamentary 
Radicalism served but to intensify his feeling that 
the poor were without a helper. He saw that the 
problem of poverty lay deeper than any mere meas- 
ure of political reform. "Chartism," he declares, 
"means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, 
the wrong condition therefore or the wrong dispo- 
sition of the Working Classes of England." It is 
no wonder that Lockhart declined the article for the 
Quarterly Review, and that Mill, not yet estranged 
from Carlyle, wished to print it in his final number 
of the Westminster Review. But Carlyle, as we 
have said, preferred to print Chartism himself. 

The Reform Bill of 1832, it must be remembered, 
had increased the dominance of the middle classes 
at the political expense of the lower classes. The 
Poor Law of 1834 was harsh in its measures and 
was hated by the working people. The program of 
the phartists, therefore, called for universal man- 



164 CARLYLE 

hood suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by ballot 
without property qualifications, the payment of 
members of Parliament, and equalized political dis- 
tricts. These "points" of Chartism had long been 
commonplaces of the parliamentary Radicals, but 
they were now supported, under eloquent popular 
leadership, by vast bodies of working men, deter- 
mined to win their contentions by demonstrations of 
physical force. The climax did not come, in fact, 
until the gigantic fiasco of 1848, described in Kings- 
ley's Alton Locke; but the moral situation was clear 
enough by 1839. 

Carlyle's chief contribution to this long agitation 
was in furnishing what we should now call the "so- 
ciological" point of view. "Where the great mass 
of men is tolerably right, all is right; where they are 
not right, all is wrong." 

Here is an epoch-making passage : 

"What constitutes the well-being of a man? Many 
things; of which the wages he gets, and the bread 
he buys with them are but one preliminary item. 
Grant, however, that the wages were the whole; 
that once knowing the wages and the price of bread, 
we know all; then what are the wages? Statistic 
Inquiry, in its present unguided condition, can not^ 



CHARTISM 165 

tell. The average rate of day's wages is not cor- 
rectly ascertained for any portion of this country; 
not only not for half-centuries, it is not even ascer- 
tained anywhere for decades or years : far from in- 
stituting comparisons with the past, the present itself 
is unknown to us. And then, given the average of 
wages, what is the constancy of employment; what 
is the difficulty of finding employment; the fluctua- 
tion from season to season, from year to year? Is 
it constant, calculable wages; or fluctuating, incal- 
culable, more or less of the nature of gambling? 
This secondary circumstance, of quality in wages, is 
perhaps even more important than the primary one 
of quantity. Farther we ask, Can the labourer, by 
thrift and industry, hope to rise to mastership; or 
is such hope cut off from him? How is he related 
to his employer; by bonds of friendliness and mu- 
tual help; or by hostility, opposition, and chains of 
mutual necessity alone? In a word, what degree of 
contentment can a human creature be supposed to 
enjoy in that position? With hunger preying on 
him, his contentment is likely to be small ! But even 
>vith abundance, his discontent, his real misery may 
be great. Jhe labourer's feelings, his notion of be- 
ing justly dealt with or unjustly; his wholesome 



166 CARLYLE 

composure, frugality, prosperity in the one case, his 
acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual 
ruin in the other, — how shall figures of arithmetic 
represent all this ? So much is still to be ascertained ; 
much of it by no means easy to ascertain! Till, 
among the *Hill Cooly* and 'Dog-cart' questions, 
there arise in Parliament and extensively out of it 
a *Condition-of -England question,' and quite a new 
set of inquirers and methods, little of it is likely to 
be ascertained. 

"One fact on this subject, a fact which arithmetic 
is capable of representing, we have often considered 
would be worth all the rest : Whether the labourer, 
whatever his wages are, is saving money? Lay- 
ing up money, he proves that his condition, painful 
as it may be without and within, is not yet desperate ; 
that he looks forward to a better day coming, and 
is still resolutely steering towards the same ; that all 
the lights and darknesses of his lot are united under 
a blessed radiance of hope, — the last, first, nay one 
may say the sole blessedness of man. Is the habit 
of saving increased or increasing, or the contrary?" 

Carlyle combats, of course, the laissez faire or 
"let alone" doctrine of the orthodox political econ- 
omists. To him it is "false, heretical, and damnable." 



CHARTISM 167 

The lower classes must be taken care of by the 
higher; there must be supervision by a central au- 
thority; the laborer has a right to "that guidance 
and government which he can not give himself." 
Here is the central point of Carlyle's position— and 
the point, of course, where he parts company with 
Mill and the whole trend of modern democracy. 
Carlyle hears from the multitude the inarticulate 
prayer: "Guide me, govern me! I am mad and 
miserable, and can not guide myself Y' "Surely," 
he goes on, "of all 'rights of man,' this right of the 
ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be gently 
or forcibly held in the true course by him, is the in- 
disputablest." 

Jhen follows the indictment of Democracy, which 
the present-day reader will do well to compare with 
Lowell's address on Democracy, and with any of 
Abraham Lincoln's speeches : — 

"Democracy, we are well aware, what is called 
'self-government' of the multitude by the multitude, 
is in words everywhere passionately clamoured for 
at present. Democracy makes rapid progress in 
these latter times, and ever more rapid, in a perilous 
accelerative ratio ; towards democracy, and that only, 
the progress of things is everywhere tending as to 



168 CARLYLE 

the final goal and winning-post. So think, so 
clamour the multitudes everywhere. And yet all 
men may see, whose sight is good for much, that in 
democracy can lie no finality; that with the com- 
pletest winning of democracy there is nothing yet 
won, — except emptiness, and the free chance to win ! 
Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self -cancelling 
business; and gives in the long run a net result of 
zero. Where no government is wanted, save that of 
the parish-constable, as in America with its bound- 
less soil, every man being able to find work and 
recompense for himself, democracy may subsist; not 
elsewhere, except briefly, as a swift transition to- 
ward something other and farther. Democracy 
never yet, that we heard of, was able to accomplish 
much work, beyond that same cancelling of itself. 
Rome and Athens are themes for the schools ; unex- 
ceptionable for that purpose. In Rome and Athens 
as elsewhere, if we look practically, we shall find 
that it was not by loud voting and debating of many, 
but by wise insight and ordering of a few that the 
work was done. So it is ever, so will it ever be. 
. . . Not towards the impossibility, 'self-govern- 
ment* of a multitude by a giultitude; but towards 



CHARTISM 169 

some possibility, government by the wisest, does be- 
wildered Europe struggle." 

The case for Democracy against Thomas Carlyle 
scarcely needs to be stated here. Mazzini stated it 
long ago when he affirmed that Carlyle believed in 
God and in the individual man, but not in the Col- 
lective Will. Most Americans and most Englishmen 
now believe that political wisdom is not the ex- 
clusive possession of any class, and that democratic 
government is increasingly justifying itself by train- 
ing and choosing men who can solve the essential 
governmental problems. In no self-governing coun- 
try of the world is there now discoverable, at an}/ 
rate, a group of citizens whose prayer to the strong 
is : "Guide me, govern me ! I am mad and miserable, 
and can not guide myself !" 

Contemporary prayers to the strong are phrased 
somewhat differently from that ! 



CHAPTER XIII 

HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 

THE theory concerning the Strong Person, 
plainly hinted in Chartism, became the theme 
of Carlyle's next book : the lectures, namely, on He- 
roes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, 
which were delivered to fashionable London audi- 
ences in 1840 and were published in 1841. They 
were his fourth-and-last-course of lectures, and the 
only ones that have been preserved. It was Car- 
lyle's custom to "splash down'* on paper the things 
that he was likely to wish to say in public; but he 
usually spoke without notes, and with great rapid- 
ity, "Hke wild Annandale grape-shot." The physical 
and mental ordeal of public speaking was a serious 
matter for a man of Carlyle's temperament, and he 
abandoned this "mixture of prophecy and play-act- 
ing" as soon as the income from his books made it 
no longer necessary. Professor MacMechan, who 
edited Heroes with the same definitive scholarship 

170 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 171 

which he had previously devoted to Sartor, gives a 
most interesting account of Carlyle's manner of de- 
livery and of the various moods in which Londoners 
of 1840 listened to the lectures. It must be remem- 
bered that the material now before us in Heroes was 
entirely rewritten, after the lectures were delivered, 
although the characteristics of oral style are even 
more sharply marked than is usual in Carlyle's 
writing. 

The germinal idea of the six lectures is in a sen- 
tence of Hume: "The same principles naturally 
deify mortals superior in power, courage, or under- 
standing, and produce hero-worship." But in Car- 
lyle's eyes, the "super-man" is not so much the prod- 
uct of a surplusage of force — in Nietzsche's sense of 
the word — as of "sincerity." Now sincerity, accord^ 
ing to Carlyle, implies superior insight into truth| 
and loyalty to it. Not the logical processes of the 
"Understanding," but the mystical perceptions of 
the "Reason," constitute the "hero's" superiority to 
other men, and establish his claim to true leadership 
.among men. Thus our loyalty to the "hero" is in 
reality a loyalty to Truth itself, — that Truth first 
mystically perceived by the Hero, — and "this loyalty 
of all men to great men is a mystic bond. For 



172 . CARLYLE 

loyalty to the Hero is loyalty to the Eternal — it is 
more, it is acquiescence in the divine plan." 

I quote these last words from an unpublished 
essay by Mr. B. H. Lehman, who has likewise an 
acute comment upon what he terms "the mutability 
of the hero-stuff," — in other words that Carlylese 
theory of the "interchangeable" or "standardized" 
Hero which has puzzled so many readers : "All sorts 
of Heroes have a common source of truth. The 
form of any particular Hero depends upon his 
course of life and education — ^his environment. Thus 
the pressure and the need of a world of men di- 
versify the forms which the essential Hero assumes. 
The definite elements of the Hero Theory are ac- 
cordingly these : a Hero, characterized by sincerity, 
v/ which is truth of insight and veracity of conduct; a 
world of men characterized by reverence for the 
Hero and by need of him; and, resulting from the 
interplay of the great-man and the world of men, 
the Protean attitude of the Hero." 

In the light of this analysis, it is easy to see why 
jCarlyle could utilize, in support of his main conten- 
tion, such an odd collection of "super-men" as Odin, 
Mahomet, Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Knox, John- 
son, Rousseau,' Burns, Cromwell and Napoleon. All 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 173 

of these persons, surely, possessed some superior "in- 
sight," and therefore become to us revealers of the 
Divine Fact. The quaHties which mark such Heroes 
are precisely the qualities which Carlyle had been 
praising for fifteen years in his Essays, in Sartor, in 
The French Revolution, and in Chartism; and which 
he was soon to glorify in Cromwell and in Frederick, 

But let us listen to Carlyle himself. First, as to 
his theme : — 

"We have undertaken to discourse here for a little 
on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our 
world's business, how they have shaped themselves 
in the world's history, what ideas men formed of 
them, what work they did; — on Heroes, namely, 
and on their reception and performance ; what I call 
Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs. Too 
evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other 
treatment than we can expect to give it at present. 
A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as 
Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Uni- 
versal History, the history of what man has accom- 
plished in this world, is at bottom the History of 
the Great Men who have worked here. They were 
the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, 
patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever. 



174 CARLYLE 

the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain ; 
all things that we see standing accomplished in the 
world are properly the outer material result, the 
practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts 
that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: 
the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly 
be considered, were the history of these. Too clearly 
it is a topic we shall do no justice to in this place 1 
"One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any 
way, are profitable company. We can not look, how- 
ever imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining 
something by him. He is the living light- fountain, 
which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light 
which enlightens, which has enlightened the dark- 
ness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp 
only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by 
the gift of Heaven; a flowing light- fountain, as I 
say, of native original insight, of manhood and he- 
roic nobleness ; — in whose radiance all souls feel that 
it is well with them. On any terms whatsoever, you 
will not grudge to wander in such neighbourhood 
for a while. These Six classes of Heroes, chosen 
out of widely distant countries and epochs, and in 
mere external figure differing altogether, ought, if 
we look faithfully at them, to illustrate several 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 175 

things for us. Could we see them well, we should 
get some glimpses into the very marrow of the 
world's history. How happy, could I but, in any 
measure, in such times as these, make manifest to 
you the meanings of Heroism; the divine relation 
( for I may well call it such) which in all times unites 
a Great Man to other men ; and thus, as it were, not 
exhaust my subject, but so much as break ground 
on it ! At all events, I must make the attempt." 

Next, note Carlyle's explanation of the Great 
Man's "Sincerity",: — 

"But of a Great Man especially, of him 1 will ven- 
ture to assert that it is incredible he should have 
been other than true. It seems to me the primary 
foundation of him, and of all that can lie in him, 
this. No Mirabeau, Napoleon, Burns, Cromwell, no 
man adequate to do anything, but is first of all in 
right earnest about it ; what I call a sincere man. I 
should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, 
is the first characteristic of all men in any way he- 
roic. Not the sincerity that calls itself sincere; ah 
no, that is a very poor matter indeed; — a shallow 
braggart conscious sincerity; oftenest self-conceit 
mainly. The Great Man's sincerity is of the kind 
he can not speak of, is not conscious of j nay, I sup-; 



176 CARLYLE 

pose, he is conscious rather of ^sincerity; for what 
man can walk accurately by the law of truth for one 
day? No, the Great Man does not boast himself 
sincere, far from that; perhaps does not ask himself 
if he is so : I would say rather, his sincerity does not 
depend on himself; he can not help being sincere! 
The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly 
as he will, he can not get out of the awful presence 
of this Reahty. His mind is so made; he is great 
by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real 
as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. 
Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in 
a vain show, he can not. At all moments the Flame- 
image glares in upon him ; undeniable, there, there ! 
* — I wish you to take this as my primary definition 
of a Great Man. A little man may have this, it is 
competent to all men that God has made : but a Great 
Man can not be without it. 

"Such a man is what we call an original man ; he 
comes to us at first-hand. A messenger he, sent from 
the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us. We may 
call him Poet, Prophet, God ; — in one way or other, 
we all feel that the words he utters are as no othet 
man^s words. Direct from the Inner Fact of- 
things; — he lives, and has to live, in daily com^ 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 177, 

munion with that. Hearsays can not hide it from 
him ; he is bhnd, homeless, miserable, following hear- 
says; it glares in upon him. Really his utterances, 
are they not a kind of 'revelation' ; — what we must 
call such for want of some other name? It is from^ 
the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion 
of the primal reality of things. God has made many 
revelations : but this man too, has not God made 
him, the latest and newest of all? The 'inspiration 
of the Almighty giveth him understanding' : we 
must listen before all to him." 

Here are two brief passages dealing with the 
"mutability of the hero-stuff" : — 

"For at bottom the Great Man, as he comes from 
the hand of Nature, is ever the same kind of thing: 
Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it 
appear that these are all originally of one stuff; that 
only by the world's reception of them, and the shapes 
they assume, are they so immeasurably diverse. The 
worship of Odin astonishes us, — to fall prostrate 
before the Great Man, into deliquium of love and 
wonder over him, and feel in their hearts that he 
was a denizen of the skies, a god! This was im- 
perfect enough: but to welcome, for example, a 
Burns as we did, was that what we can call perfect ? 



178 CARLYLE 

The most precious gift that Heaven can give to the 
Earth; a man of 'genius' as we call it; the Soul of 
a Man actually sent down from the skies with a 
God's-message to us, — this we waste away as an 
idle artificial firework, sent to amuse us a little, and 
sink it into ashes, wreck and ineffectuality : such 
reception of a Great Man I do not call very perfect 
either! Looking into the heart of the thing, one 
may perhaps call that of Burns a still uglier phenom- 
enon, betokening still sadder imperfections in man- 
kind's ways, than the Scandinavian method itself! 
To fall into mere unreasoning deliquium of love and 
admiration, was not good; but such unreasoning, 
nay irrational supercilious no-love at all is perhaps 
still worse ! — ^^It is a thing forever changing, this of 
Hero-worship : different in each age, difficult to do 
well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole 
business of the age, one may say, is to do it well." 
"We have repeatedly endeavoured to explain that 
all sorts of Heroes are intrinsically of the same ma- 
terial; that given a great soul, open to the Divine 
Significance of Life, then there is given a man fit 
to speak of this, to sing of this, to fight- and work 
for this, in a great, victorious, enduring manner; 
there is givena Hero, — the outward shape of whom 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 179 

will depend on the time and the environment he 
finds himself in. The Priest, too, as I understand 
it, is a kind of Prophet; in him too there is required 
to be a light of inspiration, as we must name it. He 
presides over the worship of the people; is the 
Uniter of them with the Unseen Holy. He is the 
Spiritual Captain of the people; as the Prophet is 
their spiritual King with many captains : he guides 
them heavenward, by wise guidance through this 
Earth and its work. The ideal of him is, that he 
too be what we can call a voice from the unseen 
Heaven; interpreting, even as the Prophet did, and 
in a more familiar manner unfolding the same to 
men. The unseen Heaven, — the 'open secret of the 
Universe ;' — which so few have an eye for ! He is 
the Prophet shorn of his more awful splendour; 
burning, with mild equable radiance, as the enlight- 
ener of daily life. This, I say, is the ideal of the 
Priest. So in old times; so in these, and in all 
times." 

We must choose a single paragraph from Carlyle's 
delineation of the supremacy of Shakespeare: — 

"Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opin- 
ion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously ex- 
pressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best 



180 (CARLYLE 

judgment not of this country only, but of Europe 
at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, that 
Shakespeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the 
greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has 
left record of himself in the way of Literature. On 
the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such 
a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of 
it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; 
placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that 
•great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil 
.unfathomable sea! It has been said, that in the 
constructing of Shakespeare's Dramas there is, apart 
■from all other 'faculties' as they are called, an un- 
derstanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon's 
Novum Organum. That is true; and it is not a 
truth that strikes every one. It would become more 
apparent if we tried, any of us for himself, how, 
out of Shakespeare's dramatic materials, we could 
fashion such a result ! The built house seems all so 
fit,— every way as it should be, as if it came there by 
its own law and the nature of things, — we forget 
the rude disorderly quarry it was shaped from. The 
Very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself 
had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 181 

perfect than any other man, we may call Shakespeare 
in this : he discerns, knows as by instinct, what con- 
dition he works under, what his materials are, what 
his own force and its relation to them is. It is not 
a transitory glance of insight that will suffice; it is 
deliberate illumination of the whole matter; it is a 
calmly seeing eye ; a great intellect, in short. How 
a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, 
will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and 
delineation he will give of it, — is the best measure 
you could get of what intellect is in the man. Which 
circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; 
which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the 
true beginning, the true sequence and ending? To 
find out this, you task the whole force of insight 
that is in the man. He must understand the thing ; 
according to the depth of his understanding, will 
the fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. 
Does like join itself to like ; does the spirit of method 
stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment be- 
comes order ? Can the man say, Fiat lux, Let there 
be light ; and out of chaos make a world ? Precisely 
as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this." 
Finally, let us take the famous definition of King- 



182 CARLYLE 

ship, — hopelessly wrong in its etymology, but per- 
fectly indicative of Carlyle's mature (and many 
will think perverse) view of politics : — 

"We come now to the last form of Heroism; that 
which we call Kingship. The Commander over 
Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordi- 
nated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find 
their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most" 
important of Great Men. He is practically the 
summary for us of all the various figures of Hero- 
ism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of 
spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man^ 
embodies itself here, to command over us, to fur- 
nish us with constant practical teaching, to tell us 
for the day and hour what we are to do. He is 
called Rex, Regulator, Roi: our own name is still 
better; King, Konning, which means Can-ning, 
Able-man. 

"Numerous considerations, pointing towards 
jdeep, questionable, and indeed unfathomable re- 
gions, present themselves here: on the most of 
which we must resolutely for the present forbear to 
speak at all. As Burke said that perhaps fair Trial 
by Jury was the soul of Government, and that all 
legislation, administration, parliamentary debating, 



HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP 183 

and the rest of it, went on, in 'order to bring twelve 
impartial men into a jury-box;' — so, by much 
stronger reason, may I say here, that the finding of 
your Ahleman and getting him invested with the 
symbols of ability, with dignity, worship {worth" 
ship), royalty, kinghood, or whatever we call it, 
so that he may actually have room to guide accord- 
ing to his faculty of doing it, — is the business, well 
or ill accomplished, of all social procedure whatso- 
ever in this world ! Hustings-speeches, Parliamen- 
tary motions, Reform Bills, French Revolutions, all 
mean at heart this; or else nothing. Find in any 
country the Ablest Man that exists there ; raise him 
to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: 
you have a perfect government for that country ; no 
ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, consti- 
tution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can 
improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state ; an ideal 
country. The Ablest Man ; he means also the truest- 
hearted, justest, the Noblest Man : what he tells us 
to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we 
could anywhere or anyhow learn ; — the thing which 
it will in all ways behoove us, with right loyal thank- 
fulness and nothing doubting, to do! Our doing 
and life were then^ so far as government could reg- 



184 CARLYLE 

ulate it, well regulated; that were the ideal of con- 
stitutions." 

The foregoing exposition of one of the best- 
known of Carlyle's books does no justice to the ex- 
traordinary brilliancy of his varied portrait paint- 
ing, or to the historical acumen by means of which 
he restored the dimly-understood figures of Ma- 
homet and Cromwell and made them thenceforth 
living human beings in the imagination of English- 
men. But nobody who has enough intellectual in- 
terest to read Carlyle at all is likely to leave Heroes 
and Hero-Worship unread. 



CHAPTER XIV 



PAST AND PRESENT 



IN the first weeks of 1843 Carlyle laid aside tem- 
porarily his preparatory reading for Cromwell, 
and wrote, with a speed and ease unusual for him, 
another tract for the times. "I hope," he wrote to 
his mother, "it will be a rather useful kind of book. 
It goes rather in a fiery strain about the present 
condition of men in general, and the strange pass 
they are coming to; and I calculate it may awaken 
here and there a slumbering block-head to rub his 
eyes and consider what he is about in God's creation 
— a thing highly desirable at present. I found I 
could not go on with Cromwell, or with anything 
else, till I had disburdened my heart somewhat in 
regard to all that. The look of the world is really 
quite oppressive to me. Eleven thousand souls in 
Paisley alone living on three-halfpence a day, and 
the governors of the land all busy shooting part- 
ridges and passing corn-laws the while! It is a 

185 



186 CARLYLE 

, thing no man with a speaking tongue in his head is 
entitled to be silent about. My only difficulty is 
that I have far too much to say, and require great 
address in deciding how to say it." 

His picture of the "Past" was drawn from a book 
he had just been reading : Joceline de Brakelonde's 
chronicle of the Abbey of St. Edmund's Bury, at 
the close of the twelfth century. Contrasted with 
this picture of order and peace was the England of 
1843, "dying of inanition," the rich growing richer 
and the poor poorer, in their "liberty" to buy in the 
cheapest market and to sell in the dearest. "To 
whom," he asks, "is this wealth of England wealth? 
Who is it that it blesses; makes happier, wiser, 
beaut ifuler, in any way better?" 

Yet Past and Present is by no means a despair- 
ing book. Carlyle's prose never chanted a clearer 

j song of Justice, of Labor, and of ultimate Reward. 

T^' "The soul of the world is just. ... In this 
God's-world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad 
foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if 
without law, and judgment for an unjust thing is 
sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is there- 
fore no justice? It is what the fool hath said in 
his heart. It is what the wise, in all times, were 



PAST AND PRESENT, 18;^ 

wise because they denied, and knew forever not to 
be. I tell thee again, there is nothing else but jus- 
tice. One strong thing I find here below : the just 
thing, the true thing. My friend, if thou hadst all 
the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back in 
support of an unjust thing; and infinite bonfires 
visibly waiting ahead of thee, to blaze centuries long 
for thy victory on behalf of it, — I would advise 
thee to call halt, to fling down thy baton, and say, *In 
God's name. No !' Thy 'success' ? Poor devil, what 
will thy success amount to? If the thing is unjust, 
thou hast not succeeded; no, not though bonfires 
blazed from North to South, and bells rang, and 
editors wrote leading-articles, and the just thing 
lay trampled out of sight, to all mortal eyes an 
abolished and annihilated thing. Success? In few 
years thou wilt be dead and dark, — all cold, eyeless, 
deaf; no blaze of bonfires, ding-dong of bells or 
leading-articles visible or audible to thee again at all 
forever: What kind of success is that! . . . To- 
wards an eternal centre of right and nobleness, and 
of that only, is all this confusion tending. We al- 
ready know whither it is all tending ; what will have 
victory, what will have none! The Heaviest will 
reach the centre. The Heaviest, sinking through 



//^ 



188 PARLYLE 

complex fluctuating meciia and vortices, has its de- 
flections, its obstructions, nay at times its resili- 
ences, its reboundings; whereupon some block- 
head shall be heard jubilating, *See, your Heaviest 
ascends!'' — ^but at all moments it is moving centre- 
ward, fast as is convenient for it ; sinking, sinking ; 
and, by laws older than the World, old as the 
Maker's first Plan of the World, it has to arrive 
there." 

"A fair day's-wages for a fair day's-work" Car- 
lyle considers to be a just demand. It is the ever- 
lasting right of man. Even "Gurth the swineherd, 
born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, tended pigs in the 
>vood and did get some parings of the pork." Jhe 
thrall of an English manufacturer, in 1843, is not 
getting them; the gospel of "Enlightened Selfish- 
ness," preached by political economists, does not 
jvork. The one healing remedy is "Hero- Worship," 
or government by the wisest, but the precedent con- 
dition for such government is "being ourselves of 
heroic mind"j "a whole world of Heroes, that is 
>vhat we aim at! Thou and I, my friend, can, in 
the most flunky world, make, each of us, one non- 
flunky, one hero, if we likej that will be two heroes 



PAST AND PRESENT 189 

to begin with : Courage ! even that is a whole world 
of heroes to end with." 

After these admonitions, which mark a distinct 
advance over the "Hero-theory" as Carlyle had 
previously phrased it, comes the picture of the la- 
borious twelfth century abbey, presided over by 
Abbot Samson, — "a personable man of seven-and- 
forty; stout-made, stands erect as a pillar; with 
bushy eyebrows, the eyes of him beaming into you 
in a really strange way; the face massive, grave, 
with 'a very eminent nose' ; his head almost bald, its 
auburn remnants of hair, and the copious ruddy 
beard, getting slightly streaked with gray. This is 
Brother Samson; a man worth looking at." 

True enough, but we can not pause here to look 
further at him or at the work which he wrought. 
We must turn with Carlyle to the modern worker 
and the new gospel of Labor. 

"All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble"; that 
'^"^is the key-note of Book Third. Happiness is neg- 
ligible. The true human wages are what Tennyson 
was soon to call "The wages of going on." "The 
only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself 
jvith asking much about was, happiness enough to 



190 CARLYLE 

get his work done. Not *I can't eat!' but *I can't 
work!' that was the burden of all wise complaining 
among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of 
a man. That he can not work ; that he can not get 
his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day 
is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly 
over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can 
work. The night once come, our happiness, our 
unhappiness, — it is all abolished; vanished, clean 
gone; a thing that has been: 'not of the slightest 
consequence' whether we were happy as eupeptic 
Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy 
as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with 
Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the un- 
musical Meat- jack with hard labour and rust ! But 
our work, — behold that is not abolished, that has not 
vanished : our work, behold, it remains, or the want 
of it remains; — for endless Times and Eternities, 
remains; and that is now the sole question with us 
forevermore! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy 
phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone ; 
and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, 
with her silences and her veracities, is come ! ,What 
hast thou done, and how ? Happiness, unhappiness : 
all that was but the wages thou hadst; thou hast 



PAST AND PRESENT 191 

spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not 
a coin of it remains with thee, it is all spent, eaten : 
and now thy work, where is thy work? Swift, out 
with it; let us see thy work!" 

But to get the right work done, "labour must be- 
come a seeing national giant, with a soul in the body 
of him, and take his place on the throne of things.'* 
A mere abolition of the Corn-Laws is but a tem- 
porary expedient. Listen to Carlyle's prophecy, 
which has been as singularly fulfilled as was Burke's 
prophecy in his Reflections on the French Revolu- 
tion concerning the rise of a military despot ful- 
filled by the career of Napoleon: "Yes, were the 
Corn-Laws ended to-morrow, there is nothing yet 
ended; there is only room made for all manner of 
things beginning. The Corn-Laws gone, and Trade 
made free, it is as good as certain this paralysis of 
industry will pass away. We shall have another 
period of commercial enterprise, of victory and 
prosperity; during which, it is likely, much money 
will again be made, and all the people may, by the 
extant methods, still for a space of years, be kept 
alive and physically fed. The strangling band of 
Famine will be loosened from our necks; we shall 
have room again to breathe; time to bethink our^ 



192 CARLYLE 

selves, ito repent and consider! A precious and 
thrice-precious space of years; wherein to struggle 
as for life in reforming our foul ways; in alleviat- 
ing, instructing, regulating our people; seeking, as 
for life, that something like spiritual food be im- 
parted them, some real governance and guidance be 
provided them! It will be a priceless time. For 
our new period or paroxsym of commercial pros- 
perity wiH and can, on the old methods of 'Competi- 
tion and Devil take the hindmost,' prove but a 
paroxysm : a new paroxysm, — likely enough, if we 
do not use it better, to be our last. In this, of itself, 
is no salvation. If our Trade in twenty years, 
'flourishing' as never Trade flourished, could double 
itself; yet then also, by the old Laissez-faire method, 
our Population is doubled: we shall then be as we 
are, only twice as many of us, twice and ten times 
as unmanageable !" 

What is needed, says Carlyle, is a new type of 
leader, — very different from the successful British 
manufacturer of the day, "the indomitable Plugson 
of the respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks and Com- 
pany, in St. Dolly Undershot." The blind Plugson 
might really become a real Captain of Industry, did 
he but know it ! Then follow the eloquent chapters 



PAST AND PRESENT 193 

on Labor and Reward, asserting once more the 
nobility and sacredness of work. These chapters 
have been hke a trumpet-call to many an American 
who can not share Carlyle's views on politics. For 
this prophet of better days to come can not close his 
impassioned argument without a characteristic at- 
tack upon "liberty," as Mill and modern democracy 
have understood that term. "Gurth's brass collar 
did not gall him : Cedric deserved to be his master. 
The pigs were Cedric's, but Gurth too would get 
his parings of them. Gurth had the inexpressible 
satisfaction of feeling himself related indissolubly, 
though in a rude brass-collar way, to his fellow- 
mortals in this Earth. He had superiors, inferiors, 
equals. — Gurth is now 'emancipated' long since ; has 
what we call 'Liberty.' Liberty, I am told, is a di- 
vine thing. Liberty when it becomes the 'Liberty 
to die by starvation' is not so divine ! Liberty ? The 
true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in 
his finding out, or being forced to find out the right 
path, and to walk thereon. To learn, or to be taught, 
what work he actually was able for; and then by 
permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set 
about doing of the same ! That is his true blessed- 
ness, honour, 'liberty' and maximum of well-being : 



194 CARLYLE 

if liberty be not that, I for one have small care about 
liberty." 

Carlyle's difficulty lay in his distrust of humanity : 
in his wavering faith in his own doctrine of creat- 
ing a "world of heroes" by beginning with two. 
"The grand problem/' he confesses, "yet remains to 
solve : that of finding government by your Real Su- 
periors ! Alas, how shall we ever learn the solution 
of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering, 
God-forgetting unfortunates as we aret' 

But meantime there are certain concrete things 
that may be done, and here Carlyle is a modern of 
the moderns. How he anticipates twentieth-cen- 
tury legislation in passages like this: "Again, are 
not Sanitary Regulations possible for a Legislature ? 
The old Romans had their vEdiles; who would, I 
think, in direct contravention to supply-and-demand, 
have rigourously seen rammed up into total abolition 
many a foul cellar in our Southwarks, St. Gileses, 
and dark poison-lanes; saying sternly, 'Shall a Ro- 
man man dwell there?' The Legislature, at what- 
ever cost of consequences, would have had to an- 
swer, 'God forbid!' — The Legislature, even as it 
now is, could order -all dingy Manufacturing Towns 
to cease from their soot and darkness ; to let in the 



PAST AND PRESENT 195 

blessed sunlight, the blue of Heaven, and become 
clear and clean; to burn their coal-smoke, namely, 
and make flame of it. Baths, free air, a wholesome 
temperature, ceilings twenty feet high, might be or- 
dained, by Act of Parliament, in all establishments 
licensed as Mills. There are such Mills already ex- 
tant; — honour to the builders of them! The Legis- 
lature can say to others: Go ye and do likewise; 
better if you can. 

"Every toiling Manchester, its smoke and soot all 
burnt, ought it not, among so many world-wide con- 
quests, to have a hundred acres or so of free green- 
field, with trees on it, conquered, for its little chil- 
dren to disport in ; for its all-conquering workers to 
take a breath of twilight air in? You would say 
so! A willing Legislature could say so with effect. 
A willing Legislature could say very many things ! 
And to whatsoever 'vested interest,' or such like, 
stood up, gainsaying merely, *I shall lose profits/ — 
the willing Legislature would answer, *Yes, but my 
sons and daughters will gain health, and life, and 
a soul.' — 'What is to become of our Cotton-trade?' 
cried certain Spinners, when the Factory Bill was 
proposed; 'What is to become of our invaluable Cot- 
ton-trade?' The Humanity of England answered 



196 CARLYLE 

steadfastly: 'Deliver me these rickety perishing 
souls of infants, and let your Cotton-trade take its 
chance. God Himself commands the one thing; not 
God especially the other thing. We can not have 
prosperous Cotton-trades at the expense of keeping 
the Devil a partner in them V '' 

And how prophetic has his vision of profit-sharing 
become! "A question arises here: Whether, in 
some ulterior, perhaps not far-distant stage of this 
'Chivalry of Labour,' your Master- Worker may 
not find it possible, and needful, to grant his Work- 
ers permanent interest in his enterprise and theirs? 
So that it become, in practical result, what in essen- 
tial fact and justice it ever is, a joint enterprise ; all 
men, from the Chief Master down to the lowest 
Overseer and Operative, economically as well as 
loyally concerned for it? — Which question I do not 
answer. The answer, near or else far, is perhaps, 
Yes; — and yet one knows the difficulties. Despot- 
ism is essential in most enterprises ; I am told, they 
do not tolerate 'freedom of debate' on board a 
Seventy- four ! Republican senate and plebiscita 
would not answer well in Cotton-Mills. And yet 
observe there too: Freedom, not nomad's or ape's 
Freedom, but man's Freedom; this is indispensable. 



PAST AND PRESENT 197, 

We must have it, and will have it! To reconcile 
Despotism with Freedom : — well, is that such a mys- 
tery ? Do you not already know the way ? It is to 
make your Despotism just, Rigourous as Destiny; 
but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws 
of God : all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom* 
at all but in obeying them. The way is already 
known, part of the way; — and courage and some 
qualities are needed for walking on it!" 

Finally, like the song of a Dante emerging from 
Hell into the clear sweet upper air, comes Carlyle's 
closing chant to the Workers : 

"But it is to you, ye Workers, who do already 
.work, and are as grown men, noble and honourable 
in a sort, that the whole world calls for new work 
and nobleness. Subdue mutiny, discord, wide- 
spread despair, by man fulness, justice, mercy and 
wisdom. Chaos is dark, deep as Hell; let light be; 
and there is instead a green flowery world. Oh, it 
is great, and there is no other greatness. To make 
some nook of God's Creation a little fruit fuler, bet- 
ter, more worthy of God; to make some human 
hearts a little wiser, man fuler, happier — more 
blessed, less accursed ! It is work for a God. Sooty 
Hell of Mutiny and savagery and despair can, by 



^ 



198 CARLYLE 

man's energy, be made a kind of Heaven; cleared 
of its soot, of its mutiny, of its need to mutiny ; the 
everlasting arch of Heaven's azure overspanning it 
too, and its cunning mechanism and tall chimney- 
steeples, as a birth of Heaven; God and all men 
looking on it well pleased. 

"Unstained by wasteful deformities, by wasted 
tears or heart's-blood of men, or any defacement 
of the Pit, noble fruitful Labour, growing ever 
nobler, will come forth, — the grand sole miracle 
of Man; whereby Man has risen from the low places 
of this Earth, very literally, into divine Heavens. 
Ploughers, Spinners, Builders; Prophets, Poets, 
Kings; Brindleys and Goethes, Odins and Ark- 
wrights; all martyrs, and noble men, and Gods are 
of one grand Host; immeasurable; marching ever 
forward since the beginnings of the World. The 
enormous, all-conquering, flame-crowned Host, no- 
ble every soldier in it; sacred and alone noble. Let 
him who is not of it hide himself; let him tremble 
for himself. Stars at every button can not make 
him noble; sheaves of Bath-garters, nor bushels of 
Georges; nor any other contrivance but manfully 
enlisting in it, valiantly taking place and step in it. 
O Heavens will he not bethink himself; he too is so 



PAST AND PRESENT 199 

needed in the Host! It were so blessed, thrice- 
blessed, for himself and for us all! In hope of the 
Last Partridge, and some Duke of Weimar among 
our English Dukes, we will be patient yet a while. 

" The future hides in it 
Gladness and sorrow ; 
We press still thorow, 
Nought that abides in it 
Daunting us, — onward/ " 



CHAPTER XV 



CROMWELL 



^^LIVER CROMWELL'S Letters and 
\^ Speeches with Elucidations, published in 
1845, is a work far different from Carlyle's orig- 
inal intentions. Twenty-three years before, he had 
planned an essay on the period of the Civil Wars 
and the Commonwealth, but it was never written. 
In December, 1838, Mill wished him to write on 
Cromwell for the Westminster Review, but Car- 
lyle was forestalled by J. Robertson, the editor, who 
wanted the subject himself. Carlyle worked on 
Cromwell, nevertheless, throughout 1839, and in 
the lecture on Cromwell as Hero in 1840 he sketched 
the essential outline of his view of the Protector. 
To him, Oliver was an "Able-Man,'' an "inarticulate 
Captain," — ^yet not so inarticulate as he seems. 
Carlyle accepted neither "the Tory myth of a regi- 
cide monster'* nor "the Whig myth of a vulgar and 
ridiculous hypocrite," and even within the brief 

200 



CROMWELL 201 

limits of his Hero lecture he created a new Crom- 
well whom the world has come to accept as the real 
Cromwell. In 1843 Carlyle gave up his plan of 
writing a history of the whole period, — a task since 
then performed by S. R. Gardiner — and confined 
himself to annotations upon Cromwell's letters and 
speeches. 

His instinct was wise. By nature he was indif- 
ferent to those constitutional and fiscal questions 
upon which the Civil Wars so largely turned; 
Hampden, Eliot and Pym seemed to him "no-he- 
roes." He failed to understand certain aspects of 
Puritanism. He was not interested, as his French 
Revolution had already proved, in the systematic, 
patient exposition of historical fact. Save for the 
elaborate and matchless picture of the battle of 
Dunbar, there is scarcely a piece of "set composi- 
tion" — such as the execution of Charles I or the 
flight of Charles H might have furnished — in the 
three volumes. The style has no key-note, unless 
one is to be discovered in the brief lyrical interludes 
pathetically apostrophising "my brave Oliver" in 
the final volume. 

What then do we have? Let us listen to W. A. 
Shaw, one of the recent editors of the work : "With 



202 CARLYLE 

or without his will, and possibly even without his 
being aware of it — such is the superb art of the 
book — the reader is reading, not the words of a 
latter-day historian, not a tale that is told, but the 
living, spoken word of the protagonist in that 
mighty conflict. What other book has ever thus 
revivified the dry bones of historical material? 
What other book has ever compelled the unwilling 
millions to listen to the very tones of the voice of a 
dead hero, to stand face to face to him in the flesh, 
to know him from the standpoint not of our day but 
of his own? Answer there is none, for herein the 
book has no compeer. By the side of the imaginative 
effect thus wrought, by the side of the naked and 
imperious truth of such self -portrayal, the ordinary 
art of the mere historian or of the mere biographer 
would have been fatuity." 

In other words, Carlyle's personal relation to his 
authorities and hero has such magical vividness that 
we ourselves see men and objects as if we were 
physically present. It is "my brave Oliver." Mark 
Noble, one of Carlyle's authorities, is addressed as 
"my imbecile friend" ; Bulstrode, another authority, 
has a "fat, terrene mind," and we are made to feel it 
as by physical contact. The books which Carlyle 



CROMWELL 203 

used in writing his Cromwell — like the books used 
in the preparation of his Frederick — were presented 
by him to the Harvard library, and the marginal 
comments are full of these personal exclamations 
of admiration or of disgust. And what is true of 
Carlyle's attitude toward his authorities is still more 
significantly true of his attitude toward the historic 
events themselves. He is present, as spectator and 
listener. " *I never saw such a charge of boot and 
horse,' says one; nor did I" Upon Cromwell's 
dismission of the Rump Parliament "They all van- 
ished; flooding gloomily clamourously out" Now, 
as Mr. Kipling says: "How does the picture-man 
know?" That question is of course unanswerable, — 
but no one ever read Carlyle's Cromwell without 
feeling that this picture-man does know, because he 
was there! 

Of the importance of the contribution thus made 
to English history, Froude is surely competent to 
speak : 
X "This book is, in my opinion, by far the most im- 
I portant contribution to English history which has 
\been made in the present century. Carlyle was the 
first to break the crust which has overlaid the sub- 
ject of Cromwell since the Restoration, and to make 



204 CARLYLE 

Cromwell and Cromweirs age intelligible to man- 
kind. Any one who will read what was written 
about him before Carlyle's work appeared, and 
what has been written since, will perceive how great 
was the achievement. The enthusiast, led away by 
ambition, and degenerating into the hypocrite, the 
received figure of the established legend, is gone 
forever. We may retain each our own opinion 
about Cromwell, we may think that he did well or 
that he did ill, that he was wise or unwise; but we 
see the real man. We can entertain no shadow of 
doubt about the genuineness of the portrait; and, 
with the clear sight of Oliver himself, we have a 
new conception of the Civil War and of its conse- 
quences. The book itself carries marks of the diffi- 
culty with which it was written. It has no clear 
continuity; large gaps are left in the story. Con- 
trary to his own rule, that the historian should con- 
fine himself to the facts, with the minimum of com- 
mentary, Carlyle breaks in repeatedly in his own 
person, pats his friends upon the back, expands, 
applauds, criticises to an extent which most read- 
ers would wish more limited. This, however, is lo 
be remembered, that he was reproducing letters and 
speeches, of which both the thought and the Ian- 



CROMWELL 205 

guage were obsolete — obsolete, or worse than ob- 
solete, for most of it had degenerated into cant, in- 
sincere in every one who uses such expressions now, 
and therefor suggesting insincerity in those who 
used them then. Perhaps he allowed too little for 
our ability to think for ourselves. But he had seen 
how fatally through this particular cause the char- 
acter of the Commonwealth leaders had been ob- 
scured, and, if he erred at all, he erred on the right 
side. It is his supreme merit that he first understood 
the speeches made by Cromwell in Parliament, and 
enabled us to understand them. Printed as they 
had hitherto been, they could only confirm the im- 
pression, either that the Protector's own mind was 
hopelessly confused, or that he purposely concealed 
what was in it. Carlyle has shown that they were 
perfectly genuine speeches, not eloquent, as modern 
parliamentary speeches are, or aspire to be thought ; 
but the faithful expressions of a most real and de- 
termined meaning, about which those who listened to 
him could not have been left in doubt at all. Such 
a feat was nothing less than extraordinary. It was 
not a 'whitewashing,* as attempts of this kind are 
often scornfully and sometimes deservedly called. 
It was the recovery of a true human figure of im- 



206 CARLYLE 

mense historical consequence from below two cen- 
turies of accumulated slander and misconception, 
and the work was completely done. No hammering 
or criticising has produced the least effect upon it. 
There once more Cromwell stands actually before 
us, and henceforth will stand, as he was when he 
lived upon the earth. He may be loved or he may 
be hated, as he was both loved and hated in his 
own time; but we shall love or hate the man him- 
self, not a shadow or a caricature any more." 

The Battle of Dunbar 

"The small Town of Dunbar stands, high and 
windy, looking down over its herring-boats, over 
its grim old Castle now much honeycombed, — on one 
of those projecting rock-promontories with which 
that shore of the Frith of Forth is niched and van- 
dyked, as far as the eye can reach. A beautiful sea; 
good land too, now that the plougher understands 
his trade; a grim niched barrier of whinstone shel- 
tering it from the chafings and tumblings of the big 
blue German Ocean. Seaward St. Abb*s Head, of 
whinstone, bounds your horizon to the east, not 
very far off; west, close by, is the deep bay, and 
fishy little village of Belhaven: the gloomy Bass 



CROMWELL 207 

and other rock-islets, and farther the Hills of Fife, 
and foreshadows of the Highlands, are visible as 
you look seaward. From the bottom of Belhaven 
Bay to that of the next sea-bight St. Abb's-ward, 
the Town and its environs form a peninsula. Along 
the base of which peninsula, 'not much above a mile 
and a half from sea to sea,' Oliver Cromwell's Army, 
on Monday 2d of September 1650, stands ranked, 
with its tents and Town behind it, — in very forlorn 
circumstances. This now is all the ground that 
Oliver is lord of in Scotland. His ships lie in the 
offing, with biscuit and transport for him : but visible 
elsewhere in the Earth no help. 

"Landward as you look from the Town of Dun- 
bar there rises, some short mile off, a dusky con- 
tinent of barren heath Hills; the Lammermoor, 
where only mountain-sheep can be at home. The 
crossing of which, by any of its boggy passes, and 
brawling stream-courses, no Army, hardly a solitary 
Scotch Packman could attempt, in such weather. To 
the edge of these Lammermoor Heights, David 
Lesley has betaken himself; lies now along the out- 
most spur of them, — a long Hill of considerable 
height, which the Dunbar people call the Dun, Doon, 
or sometimes for fashion's sake the Down, adding 



208 CARLYLE 

to it the Teutonic Hill likewise, though Dun itself 
in old Celtic signifies Hill. On this Doon Hill lies 
David Lesley with the victorious Scotch Army, up- 
wards of Twenty- thousand strong; with the Com- 
mittees of Kirk and Estates, the chief Dignitaries 
of the Country, and in fact the flower of what the 
pure Covenant in this the Twelfth year of its exist- 
ence can still bring forth. There lies he since Sun- 
day night on the top and slope of this Doon Hill, 
with the impassable heath-continents behind him; 
embraces, as within outspread tiger-claws, the base- 
line of Oliver's Dunbar peninsula; waiting what 
Oliver will do. Cockburnspath with its ravines 
has been seized on Oliver's left, and made impassa- 
ble; behind Oliver is the sea; in front of him Les- 
ley, Doon Hill, and the heath-continent of Lam- 
mermoor. Lesley's force is of Three-and-twenty- 
thousand, in spirits as of men chasing, Oliver's 
about half as many, in spirits as of men chased. 
What is to become of Oliver? . . . 

"The base of Oliver's 'Dunbar Peninsula,' as we 
have called it (or Dunbar Pinfold where he is now 
hemmed in, upon 'an entanglement very difficult'), 
extends from Belhaven Bay on his right, to Brocks- 
mouth House on his left; 'about a mile and a half 



CROMWELL 209 

from sea to sea/ Brocksmouth House, the Earl 
(now Duke) of Roxsburgh's mansion, which still 
stands there, his soldiers now occupy at their ex- 
treme post on the left. As its name indicates, it is 
the mouth or issue of a small Rivulet, or Burn, called 
Brock, Brocksburn; which, springing from the Lam- 
mermoor, and skirting David Lesley's Doon Hill, 
finds its egress here into the sea. The reader who 
would form an image to himself of the great Tues- 
day 3d of September 1650, at Dunbar, must note 
well this little Burn. It runs in a deep grassy glen, 
which the South-country Officers in those old 
Pamphlets describe as a *deep ditch, forty feet in 
depth, and about as many in width,' — ditch dug out 
by the little Brook itself, and carpeted with green- 
sward, in the course of long thousands of years. 
It runs pretty close by the foot of Doon Hill; 
forms, from this point to the sea, the boundary of 
Oliver's position; his force is arranged in battle- 
order along the left bank of this Brocksburn, and 
its grassy glen ; he is busied all Monday, he and his 
Officers, in ranking them there. 'Before sunrise on 
Monday' Lesley sent down his horse from the Hill- 
top, to occupy the other side of this Brook; 'about 
four in the afternoon' his train came down, his 



210 CARLYLE 

whole Army gradually came down; and they i)ow 
are ranking themselves on the opposite side of 
Brocksburn, — on rather narrow ground; cornfields, 
but swiftly sloping upwards to the steep of Doon 
Hill. This goes on, in the wild showers and winds 
of Monday 2d September 1650, on both sides of the 
Rivulet of Brock. Whoever will begin the attack, 
must get across this Brook and its glen first ; a thing 
of much disadvantage. 

"Behind Oliver's ranks, between him and Dun- 
bar, stand his tents; sprinkled up and down, by 
battalions, over the face of this 'Peninsula;' which 
is a low though very uneven tract of ground; now 
in our time all yellow with wheat and barley in the 
autumn season, but at that date only partially tilled, 
■ — describable by Yorkshire Hodgson as a place of 
plashes and rough bent-grass; terribly beaten by 
showery winds that day, so that your tent will 
hardly stand. There was then but one Farm-house 
on this tract, where now are not a few : thither were 
Oliver's Cannon sent this morning ; they had at first 
been lodged 'in the Church,' an edifice standing then 
as now somewhat apart, 'at the south end of Dun- 
bar.' We have notice of only one other 'small 
house,' belike some poor shepherd's homestead, in 



CROMWELL 211 

Oliver's tract of ground: it stands dose by the 
Brock Rivulet itself, and in the bottom of the little 
glen; at a place where the banks of it flatten them- 
selves out into a slope passable for carts: this of 
course, as the one 'pass' in that quarter, it is highly- 
important to seize. Pride and Lambert lodged 'six 
horse and fifteen foot' in this poor hut early in the 
morning: Lesley's horse came across, and drove 
them out ; killing some and 'taking three prisoners ;' 
— and so got possession of this pass and hut; but 
did not keep it. Among the three prisoners was one 
musketeer, 'a very stout man, though he has but a 
wooden arm,' and some iron hook at the end of it, 
poor fellow. He 'fired thrice,' not without effect, 
with his wooden arm; and was not taken without 
difficulty: a hand fast stubborn man; they carried 
him across to General Lesley to give some account 
of himself. In several of the old Pamphlets, which 
agree in all the details of it, this is what we read : 

" 'General David Lesley (old Leven/ the other 
Lesley, 'being in the Castle of Edinburgh, as they 
relate), asked this man. If the Enemy did intend to 
fight? He replied, 'What do you think we come 
here for? We come for nothing else !'— 'Soldier/ 
says Lesley, 'how will you fight^ when you have 



212 CARLYLE 

shipped half of your men, and all your great guns?' 
The Soldier replied, 'Sir, if you please to draw 
your men, you shall find both men and great guns 
too'/ — A most dogged hand fast man, this with the 
wooden arm, and iron hook on it! One of the 
Officers asked, How he durst answer the General 
so saucily? He said, *I only answer the question 
put to me !" ' Lesley sent him across, free again, by 
a trumpet : he made his way to Cromwell ; reported 
what had passed, and added doggedly. He for one 
had lost twenty shillings by the business, — plundered 
from him in this action. *The Lord General gave 
him thereupon two pieces,' which I think are forty 
shillings; and sent him away rejoicing. — This is the 
adventure at the 'pass' by the shepherd's hut in the 
bottom of the glen, close by the Brocksburn itself. 

"And now farther, on the great scale, we are to 
remark very specially that there is just one other 
'pass' across the Brocksburn; and this is precisely 
where the London road now crosses it ; about a mile 
east from the former pass, and perhaps two gun- 
shots west from Brocksmouth House. There the 
great road then as now crosses the Burn of Brock; 
the steep grassy glen, or 'broad ditch forty feet 



CROMWELL ' 213 

deep/ flattening itself out here once more into a 
passable slope : passable, but still steep on the south- 
ern or Lesley side, still mounting up there, with 
considerable acclivity, into a high table-ground, out 
of which the Doon Hill, as outskirt of the Lammer- 
moor, a short mile to your right, gradually gathers 
itself. There, at this 'pass,' on and about the pres- 
ent London road, as you discover after long dreary 
dim examining, took place the brunt or essential 
agony of the Battle of Dunbar long ago. Read in 
the extinct old Pamphlets, and ever again obstinately 
read, till some light rise in them, look even with 
unmilitary eyes at the ground as it now is, you do 
at last obtain small glimmerings of distinct features 
here and there, — which gradually coalesce into a 
kind of image for you; and some spectrum of the 
Fact becomes visible; rises veritable, face to face, 
on you, grim and sad in the depths of the old dead 
Time. Yes, my travelling friends, vehiculating in 
gigs or otherwise over that piece of London road, 
you may say to yourselves. Here without monument 
is the grave of a valiant thing which was done un- 
der the Sun; the footprint of a Hero, not yet quite 
undistinguishable, is here ! — 

" The Lord General about four o'clock,' say the 



214 CARLYLE 

I 

old Pamphlets, Vent into the Town to take some 

refreshment/ a hasty late dinner, or early supper, 
whichever we may call it; 'and very soon returned 
back,' — ^having written Sir Arthur's Letter, I think, 
in the interim. Coursing about the field, with 
enough of things to order; walking at last with 
Lambert in the Park or Garden of Brocksmouth 
House, he discerns that Lesley is astir on the Hill- 
side; altering his position somewhat. That Lesley 
in fact is coming wholly down to the basis of the 
Hill, where his horse had been since sunrise : com- 
ing wholly down to the edge of the Brook and glen, 
among the sloping harvest-fields there; and also is 
bringing up his left wing of horse, most part of it, 
towards his right; edging himself, 'shogging,' as 
Oliver calls it, his whole line more and more to the 
right ! His meaning is, to get hold of Brocksmouth 
House and the pass of the Brook there; after which 
it will be free to him to attack us when he will ! — 
Lesley, in fact, considers, or at least the Committee 
of Estates and Kirk consider, that Oliver is lost; 
that, on the whole, he must not be left to retreat, but 
must be attacked and annihilated here. A vague 
story, due to Bishop Burnet, the watery source of 
many such, still circulates about the world, That it 



CROMWELL 215 

was the Kirk Committee who forced Lesley down 
against his will ; that Oliver, at sight of it, exclaimed, 
*The Lord hath delivered' &c. : which nobody is in 
the least bound to believe. It appears, from other 
quarters, that Lesley was advised or sanctioned in 
this attempt by the Committee of Estates and Kirk, 
but also that he was by no means hard to advise; 
that, in fact, lying on top of Doon Hill, shelterless 
in such weather, was no operation to spin out be- 
yond necessity; — and that if anybody pressed too 
much upon him with advice to come down and fight, 
it was likeliest to be Royalist Civil Dignitaries, who 
had plagued him with the cavillings at his cuncta- 
tions, at his 'secret fellow-feeling for the Sectarians 
and Regicides,' ever since this War began. The poor 
Scotch Clergy have enough of their own to answer 
for in this business ; let every back bear the burden 
that belongs to it. In a word, Lesley descends, has 
been descending all day, and 'shogs' himself to the 
right, — urged, I believe, by manifold counsel, and by 
the nature of the case ; and, what is equally impor- 
tant for us, Oliver sees him, and sees through him, 
in this movement of his. 

"At sight of this movement, Oliver suggests to 
Lambert standing by him, Does it not give us an ad- 



216 CARLYLE 

vantage, if we, Instead of him, like to begin the at- 
tack? Here is the Enemy's right wing coming out 
to the open space, free to be attacked on any side ; 
and the main-battle, hampered in narrow sloping 
ground between Doon Hill and the Brook, has no 
room to manoeuvre or assist: beat this right wing 
where it now stands ; take it in flank and front with 
an overpowering force, — it is driven upon its own 
main-battle, the whole army is beaten? Lambert 
eagerly assents, 'had meant to say the same thing/ 
Monk, who comes up at the moment, likewise as- 
sents; as the other Officers do, when the case is set 
before them. It is the plan resolved upon for bat- 
tle. The attack shall begin tomorrow before dawn. 
"And so the soldiers stand to their arms, or lie 
within instant reach of their arms, all night; being 
upon an engagement very difficult indeed. The 
night is wild and wet; — 2d of September means 
12th by our calender: the Harvest Moon wades 
deep among clouds of sleet and hail. Whoever has 
a heart for prayer, let him pray now, for the wrestle 
of death is at hand. Pray, — and withal keep his 
powder dry! And be ready for extremities, and 
quit himself like a man ! — Thus they pass the night; 
making that Dunbar Peninsula and Brook Rivulet 



CROMWELL 217, 

long memorable to me. We English have some 
tents; the Scots have none. The hoarse sea moans 
bodeful, swinging low and heavy against these whin- 
stone bays ; the sea and the tempests are abroad, all 
else asleep but we, — and there is One that rides on 
the wings of the wind. 

"Towards three in the morning the Scotch foot, 
by order of a Major-General say some, extinguish 
their matches, all but two in a company; cower un- 
der the corn-shocks, seeking some imperfect shel- 
ter and sleep. Be wakeful, ye English; watch, and 
pray, and keep your powder dry. About four 
o'clock comes order to my puddingheaded York- 
shire friend, that his regiment must mount and 
march straightway ; his and various other regiments 
march, pouring swiftly to the left to Brocksmouth 
House, to the Pass over the Brock. With over- 
powering force let us storm the Scots right wing 
there; beat that, and all is beaten. Major Hodgson 
riding along, heard, he says, *a Cornet praying in 
the night;' a company of poor men, I think, making 
worship there, under the void Heaven, before bat- 
tle joined: Major Hodgson, giving his charge to 
a brother Officer, turned aside to listen for a minute, 
Jand worship and pray along with them; haply his 



218 CARLYLE 

last prayer on this Earth, as it might prove to be. 
But no: this Cornet prayed with such effusion as 
was wonderful ; and imparted strength to my York- 
shire friend, who strengthened his men by telHng 
them of it. And the Heavens, in their mercy, I 
think, have opened us a way of deHverance! — ^The 
Moon gleams out, hard and blue, riding among hail- 
clouds; and over St. Abb's Head a streak of dawn is 
rising. 

"And now is the hour when the attack should be, 
and no Lambert is yet here, he is ordering the line 
far to the right yet; and Oliver occasionally, in 
Hodgson's hearing, is impatient for him. The Scots 
too, on this wing, are awake; thinking to surprise 
us; there is their trumpet sounding, we heard it 
once; and Lambert, who was to lead the attack, is 
not here. The Lord General is impatient; — behold 
Lambert at last ! The trumpets peal, shattering with 
fierce clangour Night's silence ; the cannons awaken 
along all the Line : The Lord of Hosts ! The Lord 
of Hosts r On, my brave ones, on ! — 

"The dispute 'on this right wing was hot and 
stiff, for three quarters of an hour.' Plenty of fire, 
from fieldpieces, snaphanceS; matchlocks, enter- 
tains the Scotch main-battle across the Brock; — 



CROMWELL 219 

poor stiffened men, roused from the corn-shocks 
with their matches all out! But here on the right, 
their horse, Vith lancers in the front rank,* charge 
desperately; drive us back across the hollow of the 
Rivulet; — back a little; but the Lord gives us 
courage, and we storm home again, horse and foot, 
upon them, with a shock like tornado tempests; 
break them, beat them, drive them all adrift. *Some 
fled towards Copperspath, but most across their 
own foot/ Their own poor foot, whose matches 
were hardly well alight yet! Poor men, it was a 
terrible awakening for them : fieldpieces and charge 
of foot across the Brocksburn; and now here is 
their own horse in mad panic trampling them to 
death. Above Three-thousand killed upon the place : 
*I never saw such a charge of foot and horse,' says 
one; nor did L Oliver was still near to Yorkshire 
Hodgson when the shock succeeded ; Hodgson heard 
him say, *They run ! I profess they run !* And over 
St. Abb's Head and the German Ocean, just then, 
bursts the first gleam of the level Sun upon us, 
*and I heard Nol say, in the words of the Psalmist, 
"Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered," '< — or 
in Rous's metre, 



220 CARLYLE 

"Let God arise, and scattered 

Let all his enemies be ; 
And let all those that do him hate 

Before his presence flee!" 

"Even so. The Scotch Army is shivered to utter 
ruin; rushes in tumultuous wreck, hither, thither; 
to Belhaven, or, in their distraction, even to Dun- 
bar, the chase goes as far as Haddington; led by- 
Hacker. *The Lord General made a halt,' says 
Hodgson, 'and sang the Hundred-and-seventeenth 
Psalm,* till our horse could gather for the chase. 
Hundred-and-seventeenth Psalm at the foot of the 
Doon Hill ; there we uplift it, to the tune of Bangor, 
or some still higher score, and roll it strong and 
great against the sky : 

"O give ye praise unto the Lord, 

All nati-ons that be; 
Likewise ye people all, accord 

His name to magnify! 

"For great to-us-ward ever are 

His lovingkindnesses ; 
His truth endures forevermore; 

The Lord O do ye bless !" 

And now, to the chase again. 

"The Prisoners are Ten-thousand, — all the foot 



CROMWELL 221 

in a mass. Many Dignitaries are taken; not a few 
are slain; of whom see Printed Lists, — full of blun- 
ders. Provost Jaffray of Aberdeen, Member of the 
Scots Parliament, one of the Committee of Estates, 
was very nearly slain; a trooper's sword was in the 
air to sever him, but one cried. He is a man of con- 
sequence; he can ransom himself! — and the trooper 
kept him prisoner. The first of the Scots Quakers, 
by and by; and an official person much reconciled to 
Oliver. Ministers also of the Kirk Committee were 
slain; two Ministers I find taken, poor Carstairs of 
Glasgow, poor Waugh of some other place, — of 
whom we shall transiently hear again. 

"General David Lesley, vigourous for flight as for 
other things, got to Edinburgh by nine o'clock; poor 
old Leven, not so light of movement, did not get 
there till two. Tragical enough. What a change 
since January 1644, when we marched out of this 
same Dunbar up to the knees in snow ! It was to 
help and save these very men that we then marched ; 
with the Covenant in all our hearts. We have stood 
by the letter of the Covenant; fought for our Cov- 
enanted Stuart King as we could;— they again, they 
stand by the substance of it, and have trampled us 
and the letter of it into this ruinous state!— Yes, my 



222 CARLYLE 

poor friends; — and now be wise, be taught! The 
letter of your Covenant, in fact, will never rally 
again in this world. The spirit and substance of it, 
please God, will never die in this or in any world. 
"Such is Dunbar Battle; which might also be 
called Dunbar Drove, for it was a frightful rout. 
Brought on by miscalculation; misunderstanding 
of the difference between substances and semblances ; 
— by mismanagement, and the chance of war." 



CHAPTER XVI 

LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS 

CARLYLE'S final opinion of contemporary 
politics dates from 1850; the year when Jef- 
frey and Wordsworth and Peel died, and Tennyson 
published In Memoriam, — the year also of our 
American "Compromise of 1850," typified in the 
Fugitive Slave Bill. Up to this time Carlyle had 
unquestionably cherished some notion of taking part 
in politics himself. He told Froude that he had 
thought of entering Parliament "at the time of the 
Latter-Day Pamphlets" and he still hoped much 
from the leadership of Sir Robert Peel, whose 
death by accident in June, 1850, while the Pam- 
phlets were still publishing, seemed to Carlyle to be 
the final adverse stroke of fate. But his real mo- 
tive in issuing the Pamphlets was not so much to 
affect public opinion as, in his own words, "to give 
vent to myself.'* He forgot, as he did habitually, 
his wise admonition to Emerson, "A man has no 

223 



224 CARLYLE 

right to say to his own generation, turning quite 
away from it, 'Be damned !' " And saying it now; 
to his heart's relief, he was little surprised at the 
natural result upon his audience. 

"You never in your life," he wrote to his farmer 
brother Alexander, "heard such a screaming and 
squealing, — a, universal 'screigh (screech) as of 
stuck pigs.' " But his deliverances caused not 
merely anger, but what was even more fatal to his 
reputation for political wisdom, namely, amuse- 
ment. Laughter is perhaps the deadliest retort of 
the political debater, and most Englishmen con- 
tented themselves by laughing at Carlyle's extrava- 
gances. Mill, who had little sense of humor, took 
Carlyle seriously enough. When the prelude to the 
Pamphlets, the "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger 
Question," :was printed in Eraser's in December, 
1849, Mill, shocked by Carlyle's defense of negro 
slavery and praise of the beneficent whip, replied in 
Fraser's for January, 1850, to the effect that Car- 
lyle's doctrine of "born servants" was a "damnable 
doctrine," and that it was "a true work of the devil 
to throw this missile into the Abolition camp in 
America." Jhis article was signed "D"; Carlyle: 
thought it "most shrill, thin, poor and insignificant/' 



LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS 225 

but read to-day, it is obvious that Mill's position was 
not only significant, but right. 

In February Carlyle printed, not in Fraser's but 
independently, the first of his eight Pamphlets, on 
The Present Time. It contained the famous meta- 
phor of the ship doubling Cape Horn by ballot. 

"Your ship can not double Cape Horn by its ex- 
cellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and 
that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious 
exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get 
round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions al- 
ready voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour 
by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely 
careless how you vote. It you can, by voting or 
without voting, ascertain these conditions, and val- 
iantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape : 
if you can not, — the ruffian Winds will blow you 
ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb 
privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with 
most chaotic 'admonition'; you will be flung half 
frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into 
shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer 
down to Davy Jones, and will never get round Cape 
Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship; — ^yes in- 
deed, the ship's crew may be very unanimous, 



226 CARLYLE 

which doubtless, for the time being, will be very 
comfortable to the ship's crew, and to their Phan- 
tasm Captain if they have one : but if the tack they 
unanimously steer upon is guiding them into the 
belly of the Abyss, it will not profit them much ! — 
Ships accordingly do not use the ballot-box at all; 
and they reject the Phantasm species of Captains : 
one wishes much some other Entities — since all enti- 
ties lie under the same rigourous set of laws — could 
be brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at 
least of self-preservation, the first command of 
Nature. Phantasm Captains with unanimous 
votings : this is considered to be all the law and all 
the prophets, at present." 

The few Wise, in short, will have to take com- 
mand of the innumerable Foolish; that is the es- 
sence of the first Pamphlet. The second, based 
upon a recent visit to a Model Prison, breathes a 
"healthy hatred of scoundrels," a Hebraic "irrecon- 
cilable inexorable enmity to the enemies of God." 
This is excellent Carlylese matter, provided one is 
sure that he is on the Lord's side! The third 
Pamphlet is on Downing Street, and again there is 
a splendid naval metaphor, in the symbolical style 
of Burke : 



LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS 227, 

"Can anything be more unreasonable than a Sev- 
enty-four? Articulately almost nothing. But it 
has inarticulate traditions, ancient methods and 
habitudes in it, stoicisms, noblenesses, true rules 
both of sailing and of conduct; enough to keep it 
afloat on Nature's veridical bosom, after all. See; 
if you bid it to sail to the end of the world, it will 
lift anchor, go, and arrive. The raging oceans do 
not beat it back; it too, as well as the raging oceans, 
has a relationship to Nature, and it does not sink, 
but under the due conditions is borne along. If 
it meet with hurricanes, it rides them out; if it meet 
an Enemy's ship, it shivers it to powder; and in 
short, it holds on its way, and to a wonderful ex- 
tent does what it means and pretends to do. Assure 
yourself, my friend, there is an immense fund of 
truth somewhere or other stowed in that Seventy- 
four." 

But instead of this superb emblem of national 
progress, England has, alas, a Phantasm at the 
helm: "an eyeless Pilot with constitutional spec- 
tacles, steering by the ear," or, as we say in our 
American vernacular, a politician with his ear to 
the ground. Peel indeed,— whom Carlyle had just 
met,— had accomplished, in his repeal of the Corn 



228 CARLYLE 

Laws, "the largest veracity ever done in Parlia- 
ment in our time." These words were published in 
April, and in two months Peel was dead. In the 
interval Carlyle went on, attacking Oratory and 
Parliaments, and celebrating once more his "undis- 
tributed middle" — the cause of most of his fallacies 
— namely that Nature of Things which unluckily is 
usually only what you and I conceive the Nature of 
Things to be, and may not be in reality the Nature 
of Things at all ! 

As the Pamphlets draw to a close, Carlyle's bit- 
terness increases. "We are a lost gregarious horde, 
presided over by the Anarch Old." "All art and 
industry is tainted." With the power of a Swift he 
paints the Universe as an immeasurable Swine's 
trough, and composes a catechism of the Whole 
Duty of Pigs. And yet he does not end upon this 
note, but rather in the old and for Carlyle the fun- 
damental Sartor key, — namely that "God did make 
this world, and does forever govern it ;" that "Time 
does rest on Eternity; that he who has no vision of 
Eternity will never get a true hold of Time, or its 
affairs." His final injunction then is to Do Nobly, 
ere the night cometh wherein no man can work. 
Otherwise humanity will remain under a curse. 



LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS 229 

"Mount into your railways; whirl from place to 
place, at the rate of fifty, or if you like of five hun- 
dred miles an hour: you can not escape from that 
inexorable all-encircling ocean-moan of ennui. No : 
if you would mount to the stars, and do yacht- 
voyages under the belts of Jupiter, or stalk deer 
on the ring of Saturn, it would still begirdle you. 
You can not escape from it, you can but change 
your place in it, without solacement except one 
moment's. That prophetic Sermon from the deeps 
will continue with you, till you wisely interpret it 
and do it, or else till the Crack of Doom swallow 
it and you. Adieu: Au revoir/' 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE LIFE OF JOHN STERLING 

N~^ OT to know Carlyle's Life of John Sterling 
is to overlook one of the most perfect 

examples of his literary art. Those readers par- 
ticularly who regard Carlyle as primarily a prophet 
and teacher ought, from time to time, to turn again 
the pages of this charming biography, in order to 
renew their impressions of Carlyle' s mastery of ♦ 
word and phrase, his sensitiveness to landscape, his 
knack of portrait-painting, and above all his sin- 
cerity and tenderness of friendship. 

Sterling, who died in 1844 after a brief career 
in the Church and as a man of letters, was a sin- 
gularly attractive person. Archdeacon Hare, who 
with Carlyle had acted as Sterling's literary execu- 
tor, had produced a biography which seemed to Car- 
lyle too full of ecclesiastical matters to do full jus- 
tice to Sterling's many-sided sympathies. Accord- 
ingly he set himself, in 1851, to some "swift scrib- 

230 



JHE LIFE OF JOHN STERLING 231 

bling" in order to redress the balance. "Here, visi- 
ble to myself, for some while, was a brilliant human 
presence, distinguishable, honourable and lovable 
amid the dim common populations ; among the mil- 
lion Httle beautiful, once more a beautiful human 
soul: whom I, among others, recognized and lov- 
ingly walked with, while the years and the hours 
were. Sitting now by his tomb in thoughtful mood, 
the new times bring a new duty to me. *Why write 
the Life of Sterling?' I imagine I had a commis- 
sion higher than the world's, the dictate of Nature 
herself, to do what is now done. Sic prosit." 

The grace and perfection of Carlyle's perform- 
ance can not adequately be indicated by random 
quotations, but we must at least make room for the 
inimitable picture of Coleridge at Highgate, familiar 
though it be to many persons who have never given 
themselves the pleasure of reading The Life of Ster- 
ling as a whole. 

Coleridge 

"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in 
those years, looking down on London and its 
smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity 
of life's battle; attracting towards him the thoughts 



232 CARLYLE 

of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His 
express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any 
specific province of human literature or enlighten- 
ment, had been small and sadly intermittent ; but he 
had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher 
than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician char- 
acter. He was thought to hold, he alone in Eng- 
land, the key of German and other Transcendental- 
isms; knew the sublime secret of believing by *the 
reason' what *the understanding' had been obliged 
to fling out as incredible ; and could still, after Hume 
and Voltaire had done their best and worst with 
him, profess himself an orthodox Christian, and 
say and print to the Church of England, with its 
singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, 
Esto perpetua. A sublime man ; who, alone in those 
dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual man- 
hood; escaping from the black materialisms, and 
revolutionary deluges, with 'God, Freedom, Im- 
mortality' still his: a king of men. The practical 
intellects of the world did not much heed him, or 
carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: 
but to the rising spirits of the young generation he 
had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as 
a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his 



JHE LIFE OF JOHN STERLING 233 

Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at High- 
gate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether 
oracles or jargon. 

"The Gilmans did not encourage much company, 
or excitation of any sort, round their sage ; never- 
theless access to him, if a youth did reverently wish 
it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the 
pleasant garden with you, sit in the pleasant rooms 
of the place,— perhaps take you to his own peculiar 
room, high up, with a rearward view, which was 
the chief view of all. A really charming outlook, 
in fine weather. Close at hand, wide sweep of 
flowery leafy gardens, their few houses mostly hid- 
den, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy 
umbrage, flowed gloriously down hill; gloriously 
issuing in wide-tufted undulating plain-country, rich 
in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming 
country of the brightest green ; dotted all over with 
handsome villas, handsome groves ; crossed by roads 
and human traffic, here inaudible or heard only as 
a musical hum : and behind all swam, under olive- 
tinted haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of Lon- 
don, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, 
big Paul's and the many memories attached to it 
hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could 



234 CARLYLE 

you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day, 
with the set of the air going southward, — south- 
ward, and so draping with the city-smoke not you 
but the city. Here for hours would Coleridge talk, 
concerning all conceivable or inconceivable things; 
and liked nothing better than to have an intelligent, 
or failing that, even a silent and patient human lis- 
tener. He distinguished himself to all that ever 
heard him as at least the most surprising talker ex- 
tant in this world, — and to some small minority, by 
no means to all, as the most excellent. 

"The good man, he was now getting old, towards 
sixty perhaps; and gave you the idea of a life that 
had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half- 
vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of 
manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow 
and head were round, and of massive weight, but 
the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, 
of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of in- 
spiration; confused pain looked timidly from them, 
as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure 
and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called 
flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under 
possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his 
limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in 



JHE LIFE OF JOHN STERLING 235 

walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stept; 
and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which 
side of the garden- walk would suit him best, but 
continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept 
trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring and 
surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally 
soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive 
snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching, — you 
would have said, preaching earnestly and also hope- 
lessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 
'object' and 'subject,' terms of continual recurrence 
in the Kantean province; and how he sung and 
snuffled them into *om-m-mject' and 'sum-m-mject,' 
with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled 
along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could 
be more surprising. 

"Sterling, who assiduously attended him, with 
profound reverence, and was often with him by 
himself, for a good many months, gives a record of 
their first colloquy.^ Their colloquies were nu- 
merous, and he had taken note of many; but they 
are all gone to the fire, except this first, which Mr. 
Hare has printed, — unluckily without date. It con- 
tains a number of ingenious, true and half true ob- 

* Biography by Hare, pp. xvi -xxvi. 



236 CARLYLE 

servations, and is of course a faithful epitome of the 
things said; but it gives small idea of Coleridge's 
way of talking; — ^this one feature is perhaps the 
most recognisable, 'Our interview lasted for three 
hours, during which he talked two hours and three 
quarters.' Nothing could be more copious than his 
talk; and furthermore it was always, virtually or 
literally, of the nature of a monologue; suffering 
no interruption, however reverent; hastily putting 
aside all foreign additions, annotations, or most in- 
genuous desires for elucidation, as well-meant su- 
perfluities which would never do. Besides, it was 
a talk not flowing anywhither like a river, but 
spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and 
regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly deficient 
in definite goal or aim, nay often in logical intelli- 
gibility; what you were to believe or do, on any 
earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to ap- 
pear from it. So that, most times, you felt logically 
lost; swamped near to drowning in this tide of in- 
genious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to 
submerge the world. 

"To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, 
whether you consent or not, can in the long-run be 
exhilarating to no creature; how eloquent soever 



JHE LIFE QF JOHN STERLING 237 

the flood of utterance that is descending. But if it 
be withal a confused unintelligible flood of utter- 
ance, threatening to submerge all known landmarks 
of thought, and drown the world and you ! — I have 
heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two 
stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and com- 
municate no meaning whatsoever to any individual 
of his hearers, — certain of whom, I for one, still 
kept eagerly listening in hope; the most had long 
before given up, and formed (if the room were large 
enough) secondary humming groups of their own. 
He began anywhere : you put some question to him, 
made some suggestive observation: instead of an- 
swering this, or decidedly setting out towards an- 
swer of it, he would accumulate formidable appa- 
ratus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life- 
preservers and other precautionary and vehicula- 
tory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at last get 
under way, — but was swiftly solicited, turned aside 
by the glance of some radiant new game on this 
hand or that, into new courses ; and ever into new ; 
and before long into all the Universe, where it was 
uncertain what game you would catch, or whether 
any. 

*'His talk, alas, was distinguished, like himself. 



238 CARLYLE 

by irresolution : it disliked to be troubled with con- 
ditions, abstinences, definite fulfilments; — loved to 
wander at its own sweet will, and make its auditor 
and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive 
bucket for itself! He had knowledge about many 
things and topics, much curious reading; but gen- 
erally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into 
the high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy 
infinitude of Kantean transcendentalism, with its 
*sum-m-jects' and 'om-m-mjects/ Sad enough; for 
with such indolent impatience of the claims and 
ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for 
explaining this or anything unknown to them; and 
you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide unin- 
telligible deluge of things, for most part in a rather 
profitless uncomfortable manner. 

"Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out of the 
haze; but they were few, and soon swallowed in 
the general element again. Balmy sunny islets, 
islets of the blest and the intelligible: — on which 
occasions those secondary humming groups would 
all cease humming, and hang breathless upon the 
eloquent words ; till once your islet got wrapt in the 
mist again, and they could recommence humming. 
Eloquent artistically expressive words you always 



JHE LIFE OF JOHN STERLING 239 

had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight 
came at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy, 
recognisable as pious though strangely coloured, 
were never wanting long : but in general you could 
not call this aimless, cloudcapt, cloudbased, law- 
lessly meandering human discourse of reason by the 
name of 'excellent talk,' but only of 'surprising;' 
and were reminded bitterly of Hazlitt's account of 
it: 'Excellent talker, very,— if you let him start 
from no premises and come to no conclusion.' 
Coleridge was not without what talkers call wit, 
and there were touches of prickly sarcasm in him, 
contemptuous enough of the world and its idols and 
popular dignitaries; he had traits even of poetic 
humour: but in general he seemed deficient in 
laughter; or indeed in sympathy for concrete human 
things on the sunny or on the stormy side. One 
right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted 
flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble in- 
dignation at some injustice or depravity, rubbing 
elbows with us on this solid Earth, how strange 
would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and 
how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles 
and dim-melting ghosts and shadows! None such 
ever came. His life had been an abstract thinking 



240 CARLYLE 

and dreaming, idealistic, passed amid the ghosts of 
defunct bodies and of unborn ones. The moaning 
singsong of that theosophico-metaphysical monotony- 
left on you, at last, a very dreary feeling. 

"In close colloquy, flowing within narrower 
banks, I suppose he was more definite and appre- 
hensible; Sterling in aftertimes did not complain of 
his unintelligibility, or imputed it only to the ab- 
struse high nature of the topics handled. Let us 
hope so, let us try to believe so ! There is no doubt 
but Coleridge could speak plain words on things 
^plain : his observations and responses on the trivial 
matters that occurred were as simple as the com- 
monest man*s, or were even distinguished by su- 
perior simplicity as well as pertinency. 'Ah, your 
tea is too cold, Mr. Coleridge!' mourned the good 
Mrs. Oilman once, in her kind, reverential and yet 
protective manner, handing him a very tolerable 
though belated cup. — 'It's better than I deserve!' 
snuffled he, in a low hoarse murmur, partly cour- 
teous, chiefly pious, the tone of which still abides 
with me : Tt's better than I deserve !' " 



I 

r. 



CHAPTER XVIII 



FREDERICK THE GREAT 



THE disillusioned spirit in which Carlyle 
planned and executed the last and most for- 
midable of his literary undertakings, has been indi- 
cated in an earlier chapter. He had little enthusi- 
asm for his hero, and Luther, whose biography he 
had thought of writing, would doubtless have proved 
a more congenial subject. But he perceived, even 
in the "vulpine" Frederick, something of that blazing 
insight into the Nature of Things which Carlyle be- 
lieved to be the divinest of our human faculties. 
The book, then, is Carlyle's final celebration of what 
he loved to call the Divine Fact, however darkened 
and obscured that Fact might be by the confused 
welter of eighteenth century Europe. 

To trace satisfactorily the origins of the Prus- 
sian monarchy it was necessary to go far back into 
the Middle Ages, and to show the full range and 
significance of Frederick's activities it was essential 

241 



242 CARLYLE 

that his biographer should keep in view not merely 
the evolution of Central Europe in Frederick's day, 
but those world-wide happenings which influenced 
and illustrated, at this point and that, the details of 
Prussian history. Hence the extraordinary scope 
of Carlyle's narrative. As Garnett puts it, "Fred- 
erick moves in the midst of a multitudinous pageant. 
Carlyle has ransacked the earth to fill his train. 
'Quae regio terrae nostri non plena laborisf Mo- 
hawks and Moguls swell the host, philosophers jos- 
tle opera dancers; nay, the procession is headed by 
a troop of Electoral-Spectres, alive for the occasion. 
It would be a prodigious historical masquerade were 
the characters in domino. But every figure has its 
own proper visage, stamped indelibly with the ex- 
pression it bore as he flitted across this earth. 
Everything aids the picture ; some things encumber 
the history." 

The twenty-one Books that contain this vast pic- 
ture-history represent thirteen years of Carlyle's 
working life, and in bulk they make up about one 
third of all his published writing. A "tremendous 
book" indeed, as Mrs. Carlyle said! He had the 
assistance of two faithful secretaries, and made two 
visits to Europe in order to visit in person every 



FREDERICK THE GREAT 243 

one of Frederick's battle-fields. So vividly accu- 
rate were Carlyle's descriptions of his hero's cam- 
paigns and battles that for many years after the 
publication of the work it was used as a text-book 
by German officers. The triumph of Prussia over 
France in the war of 1870 contributed greatly to 
the influence of Carlyle's history, for all Europe 
wished to learn something from him as to the first 
forging of that grim military machine which had 
just crushed France, and which, in the succeeding 
half-century, has become such a portentous phe- 
nomenon to our civilization. 

Not many readers of the present volume, it may 
be supposed, have the leisure requisite for acquaint- 
ing themselves with Carlyle's Frederick in its en- 
tirety. But they should at least glance at the titles 
of the various Books, and admire the provocative, 
arresting art of the chapter headings. They should 
read, if possible, the first three books, then the 
eighteenth, — ^picturing the climax of the Seven 
Years War, — and the twenty-first, in which the 
story is drawn somewhat hurriedly and wearily to 
a close. The scope of this volume does not admit 
the presentation of any of the battle scenes. We 
must likewise omit examples of those "flash-light" 



244 CARLYLE 

episodes and portraits that give such startling 
vividness to these thousands of pages. We must 
print merely the picture of Frederick in the opening 
chapter, and then turn to the closing scene, where 
Carlyle has heard and we may still hear the curtain 
rustling down. 

Frederick 

"About fourscore years ago, there used to be 
seen sauntering on the terraces of Sans Souci, for 
a short time in the afternoon, or you might have 
met him elsewhere at an earlier hour, riding or driv- 
ing in a rapid business manner on the open roads or 
through the scraggy woods and avenues of that in- 
tricate amphibious Potsdam region, a highly inter- 
esting lean little old man, of alert though slightly 
stooping figure; whose name among strangers was 
King Friedrich the Second, or Frederick the Great 
of Prussia, and at home among the common people, 
who much loved and esteemed him, was Vater Fritz, 
— Father Fred, — a name of familiarity which had 
not bred contempt in that instance. He is a King 
every inch of him, though without the trappings of 
a King. Presents himself in a Spartan simplicity 
of vesture : no crown but an old military cocked-hat, 



FREDERICK THE GREAT 245 

—generally old, or trampled and kneaded into ab- 
solute softness, if new;— no sceptre but one like 
Agamemnon's, a walking-stick cut from the woods, 
which serves also as a riding-stick (with which he 
hits the horse 'between the ears,' say authors) ;— 
and for royal robes, a mere soldier's blue coat with 
red facings, coat likely to be old, and sure to have 
a good deal of Spanish snuff on the breast of it; 
rest of the apparel dim, unobtrusive in colour or cut, 
ending in high over-knee military boots, which may 
be brushed (and, I hope, kept soft with an under- 
hand suspicion of oil), but are not permitted to be 
blackened or varnished; Day and Martin with their 
soot-pots forbidden to approach. 

"The man is not of godlike physiognomy, any 
more than of imposing stature or costume: close- 
shut mouth with thin lips, prominent jaws and nose, 
receding brow, by no means of Olympian height; 
head, however, is of long form, and has superlative 
gray eyes in it. Not what is called a beautiful man, 
nor yet, by all appearance, what is called a happy. 
On the contrary, the face bears evidence of many 
sorrows, as they are termed, of much hard labour 
done in this world; and seems to anticipate nothing 
but more still coming. Quiet stoicism, capable 



246 CARLYLE 

enough of what joy there were, but not expecting 
any worth mention; great unconscious and some 
conscious pride, well tempered with a cheery mock- 
ery of humour, — are written on that old face ; which 
carries its chin well forward, in spite of the slight 
stoop about the neck; snuffy nose rather flung into 
the air, under its old cocked-hat, — like an old snuffy 
lion on the watch; and such a pair of eyes no man 
or lion or lynx of that Century bore elsewhere, ac- 
cording to all testimony we have. *Those eyes,' 
says Mirabeau, 'which, at the bidding of his great 
soul, fascinated you with seduction or with terror 
(portaient au gre de son dme hero'ique, la seduction 
ou la terreur) / Most excellent potent brilliant eyes, 
swift-darting as the stars, steadfast as the sun; gray, 
we said, of the azure-gray colour; large enough, 
not of glaring size; the habitual expression of them 
vigilance and penetrating sense, rapidity resting on 
depth. Which is an excellent combination; and 
gives us the notion of a lambent outer radiance 
springing from some great inner sea of light and 
fire in the man. The voice, if he speak to you, is 
of similar physiognomy, clear, melodious and son- 
orous; all tones are in it, from that of ingenuous 
inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing banter 



FREDERICK JHE GREAT 247. 

(rather prickly for most part), up to definite word 
of command, up to desolating word of rebuke and 
reprobation ; a voice *the clearest and most agreeable 
in conversation I ever heard,' says witty Dr. Moore. 
*He speaks a great deal,* continues the Doctor; 'yet 
those who hear him, regret that he does not speak 
a good deal more. His observations are always 
lively, very often just; and few men possess the 
talent of repartee in greater perfection.' 

"Just about threescore and ten years ago, his 
speakings and his workings came to finis in this 
World of Time ; and he vanished from all eyes into 
other worlds, leaving much inquiry about him in the 
minds of men; — which, as my readers and I may 
feel too well, is yet by no means satisfied. As to his 
speech, indeed, though it had the worth just ascribed 
to it and more, and though masses of it were delib- 
erately put on paper by himself, in prose and verse, 
and continue to be printed and kept legible, what he 
spoke has pretty much vanished into the inane ; and 
except as record or document of what he did, hardly 
now concerns mankind. But the things he did were 
extremely remarkable; and can not be forgotten by 
mankind. Indeed they bear such fruit to the present 
hour as all the Newspapers are obliged to be taking 



248 CARLYLE 

note of, sometimes to an unpleasant degree. Ed- 
itors vaguely account this man the 'Creator of the 
Prussian Monarchy;' which has since grown so 
large in the world, and troublesome to the Editorial 
mind in this and other countries. He was indeed 
the first who, in a highly public manner, notified its 
creation; announced to all men that it was, in very 
deed, created ; standing on its feet there, and would 
go a great way, on the impulse it had got from him 
and others. As it has accordingly done; and may 
still keep doing to lengths little dreamt of by the 
British Editor in our time; whose prophesyings 
upon Prussia, and insights into Prussia, in its past, 
or present or future, are truly as yet inconsiderable, 
in proportion to the noise he makes with them ! The 
more is the pity for him, — and for myself too in the 
Enterprise now on hand. ... 

"This was a man of infinite mark to his con- 
temporaries; who had witnessed surprising feats 
from him in the world; very questionable notions 
and ways, which he had contrived to maintain 
against the world and its criticisms. As an orig- 
inal man has always to do; much more an original 
ruler of men. The world, in fact, had tried hard to 
put him down, as it does, unconsciously or con- 



FREDERICK THE GREAT 249 

sciously, with all such; and after the most conscious 
exertions, and at one time a dead-lift spasm of all 
its energies for Seven Years, had not been able. 
Principalities and powers, Imperial, Royal, Czarish, 
Papal, enemies innumerable as the sea-sand, had 
risen against him, only one helper left among the 
world's Potentates (and that one only while there 
should be help rendered in return) ; and he led them 
all such a dance as had astonished mankind and 
them. 

"No wonder they thought him worthy of notice. 
Every original man of any magnitude is; — nay, in 
the long run, who or what else is ? But how much 
more if your original man was a king over men; 
whose movements were polar, and carried from day 
to day those of the world along with them. The 
Samson Agonistes, — were his life passed like that 
of Samuel Johnson in dirty garrets, and the produce 
of it only some bits of written paper, — the 
Agonistes, and how he will comport himself in the 
Philistine mill; this is always a spectacle of truly 
epic and tragic nature. The rather, if your Samson, 
royal or other, is not yet blinded or subdued to the 
wheel; much more if he vanquish his enemies, not 
by suicidal methods, but march out at last flourish- 



250 CARLYLE 

ing his miraculous fighting implement, and leaving 
their mill and them in quite ruinous circumstances. 
As this King Friedrich fairly managed to do. 

*Tor he left the world all bankrupt, we may say; 
fallen into bottomless abysses of destruction; he 
still in a paying condition, and with footing capable 
to carry his affairs and him. When he died, in 
1786, the enormous Phenomenon since called 
French Revolution was already growling audibly 
in the depths of the world; meteoric-electric corusca- 
tions heralding it, all round the horizon. Strange 
enough to note, one of Friedrich's last visitors was 
Gabriel Honore Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. 
These two saw one another; twice, for half-an-hour 
each time. The last of the old Gods and the first 
of the modern Titans; — before Pelion leapt on 
Ossa; and the foul Earth taking fire at last, its vile 
mephitic elements went up in volcanic thunder. This 
also is one of the peculiarities of Friedrich, that he 
is hitherto the last of the Kings; that he ushers in 
the French Revolution, and closes an Epoch of 
World-History. Finishing off forever the trade of 
King, think many; who have grown profoundly 
dark as to Kingship and him. . . . 

^'Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect 



FREDERICK THE GREAT 251 

demi-gods; and there are various things to be said 
against him with good ground. To the last, a ques- 
tionable hero; with much in him which one could 
have wished not there, and much wanting which one 
could have wished. But there is one feature which 
strikes you at an early period of the inquiry, That 
in his way he is a Reality; that he always means 
what he speaks; grounds his actions, too, on what 
he recognises for the truth ; and, in short, has noth- 
ing whatever of the Hypocrite or Phantasm. Which 
some readers will admit to be an extremely rare 
phenomenon. 

"We perceive that this man was far indeed from 
trying to deal swindler-like with the facts around 
him; that he honestly recognised said facts where- 
ever they disclosed themselves, and was very 
anxious also to ascertain their existence where still 
hidden or dubious. For he knew well, to a quite un- 
common degree, and with a merit all the higher as 
it was an unconscious one, how entirely inexorable 
is the nature of facts, whether recognised or not, 
ascertained or not; how vain all cunning or diplo- 
macy, management and sophistry, to save any mor- 
tal who does not stand on the truth of things, from 
sinking, in the longrun. Sinking to the very Mud- 



252 CARLYLE 

gods, with all his diplomacies, possessions, achieve- 
ments; and becoming an unnameable object, hidden 
deep in the Cesspools of the Universe. This I hope 
to make manifest; this which I long ago discerned 
for myself, with pleasure, in the physiognomy of 
Friedrich and his life. Which indeed was the first 
real sanction, and has all along been my inducement 
and encouragement, to study his life and him. How 
this man, officially a King withal, comported him- 
self in the Eighteenth Century, and managed not 
to be a Liar and Charlatan as his Century was, de- 
serves to be seen a little by men and kings, and may 
silently have didactic meanings in it." 

Frederick's Death 

"He well knew himself to be dying; but some 
think, expected that the end might be a little farther 
off. There is a grand simplicity of stoicism in him; 
coming as if by nature, or by long second-nature; 
finely unconsious of itself, and finding nothing of 
peculiar in this new trial lain on it. From of old, 
Life has been infinitely contemptible to him. In 
death, I think, he has neither fear nor hope. 
Atheism, truly, he never could abide : to him, as to 
all of us, it was flatly inconceivable that intellect, 



FREDERICK JHE GREAT 253 

moral emotion, could have been put into him by an 
Entity that had none of its own. But there, pretty 
much, his Theism seems to have stopped. Instinct- 
ively, too, he believed, no man more firmly, that 
Right alone has ultimately any strength in this 
world : ultimately, yes ;— but for him and his poor 
brief interests, what good was it? Hope for him- 
self in Divine Justice, in Divine Providence, I think 
he had not practically any; that the unfathomable 
Demiurgus should concern himself with such a set 
of paltry ill-given animalcules as oneself and man- 
kind are, this also, as we have often noticed, is in 
the main incredible to him. 

"A sad Creed, this of the King^s;— he had to do 
his duty without fee or reward. Yes, reader; — 
and what is well worth your attention, you will have 
difficulty to find, in the annals of any Creed, a King 
or man who stood more faithfully to his duty ; and, 
till the last hour, alone concerned himself with doing 
that. To poor Friedrich that was all the Law and 
all the Prophets: and I much recommend you to 
surpass him, if you, by good luck, have a better 
Copy of those inestimable Documents ! — Inarticulate 
notions, fancies, transient aspirations, he might 
have, in the background of his mind. One day, sit- 



254 CARLYLE 

ting for a while out of doors, gazing into the Sun, he 
was heard to murmur, Terhaps I shall be nearer 
thee soon:' — ^and indeed nobody knows what his 
thoughts were in these final months. There is 
traceable only a complete superiority to Fear and 
Hope; in parts, too, are half -glimpses of a great 
motionless interior lake of Sorrow, sadder than any 
tears or complainings, which are altogether wanting 
to it. . . . 

"Tuesday, August 15th, 1786, Contrary to all 
wont, the King did not awaken till 1 1 o'clock. On 
first looking up, he seemed in a confused state, but 
soon recovered himself; called in his Generals and 
Secretaries, who had been in waiting so long, and 
gave, with his old precision, the Orders wanted, — 
one to Rohdich, Commandant of Potsdam, about a 
Review of the troops there next day; Order minutely 
perfect, in knowledge of the ground, in foresight 
of what and how the evolutions were to be; which 
was accordingly performed on the morrow. The 
Cabinet work he went through with the like pos- 
session of himself, giving, on every point, his Three 
Clerks their directions, in a weak voice, yet with the 
old power of spirit, — dictated to one of them, among 
other things, an 'Instruction' for some Ambassador 



FREDERICK THE GREAT 255 

just leaving; *four quarto pages, which,' says Herz- 
berg, 'would have done honour to the most experi- 
enced Minister;' and, in the evening, he signed his 
Missives as usual. This evening still, — but — no 
evening more. We are now at the last scene of all, 
which ends this strange eventful History. 

"Wednesday morning, General- Adjutants, Secre- 
taries, Commandant, were there at their old hours ; 
but word came out, 'Secretaries are to wait :' King 
is in a kind of sleep, of stertorous ominous charac- 
ter, as if it were the death-sleep; seems not to rec- 
ollect himself, when he does at intervals open his 
eyes. After hours of this, on a ray of conscious- 
ness, the King bethought him of Rohdich, the Com- 
mandant ; tried to give Rohdich the Parole as usual ; 
tried twice, perhaps three times ; but found he could 
not speak; — and with a glance of sorrow, which 
seemed to say, 'It is impossible, then!' turned his 
head, and sank back into the corner of his chair. 
Rohdich burst into tears : the King again lay slum- 
berous; — the rattle of death beginning soon after, 
which lasted at intervals all day. Selle, in Berlin, was 
sent for by express ; he arrived about 3 of the after- 
noon: King seemed a little more conscious, knew; 
those about him, 'his face red rather than pale, in 



256 CARLYLE 

his eyes still something of their old fire/ Towards 
evening the feverishness abated (to Selle, I suppose, 
a fatal symptom) ; the King fell into a soft sleep, 
with warm perspiration; but, on awakening, com- 
plained of cold, repeatedly of cold, demanding wrap- 
page after wrappage {'Kiss en,' soft quilt of the old 
fashion) ; — and on examining feet and legs, one of 
the Doctors made signs that they were in fact cold, 
up nearly to the knee. *What said he of the feet?' 
murmured the King some time afterwards, the Doc- 
tor having now stepped out of sight. *Much the 
same as before,' answered some attendant. The 
King shook his head, incredulous. 

"He drank once, grasping the goblet with both 
hands, a draught of fennel-water, his customary 
drink ; and seemed relieved by it ; — his last reflection 
in this world. Towards nine in the evening, there 
had come on a continual short cough, and a rattling 
in the breast, breath more and more difficult. Why 
continue ? Friedrich is making exit, on the common 
terms ; you may hear the curtain rustling down. For 
most part he was unconscious, never more than half- 
conscious. As the wall-clock above his head struck 
11, he asked: 'What o'clock?' 'Eleven,' an- 
swered they. *At 4,' murmured he, T will rise.' 



FREDERICK THE GREAT 25:^ 

One of his dogs sat on its stool near him ; about mid- 
night he noticed it shivering for cold: 'Throw a 
quilt over it/ said or beckoned he ; that, I think, was 
his last completely-conscious utterance. After- 
wards, in a severe choking fit, getting at last rid of 
the phlegm, he said, 'La montagne est passee, nous 
irons mieux. We are over the hill, we shall go bet- 
ter now.' 

"Attendants, Herzberg, Selle and one or two oth- 
ers, were in the outer room ; none in Friedrich's but 
Striitzki, his Kammerhussar, one of Three who are 
his sole valets and nurses; a faithful ingenious man, 
as they all seem to be, and excellently chosen for the 
object; Striitzki, to save the King from hustling 
down, as he always did, into the corner of his chair, 
where, with neck and chest bent forward, breathing 
was impossible, — at last took the King on his knee ; 
kneeling on the ground with his other knee for the 
purpose, — King's right arm round Striitzki's neck, 
Striitzki's left arm round the King's back, and sup- 
porting his other shoulder; in which posture the 
faithful creature, for above two hours, sat motion- 
less, till the end came. Within doors, all is silence, 
except this breathing; around it the dark earth 
silent above it the silent stars. At 20 minutes pasf 



258 CARLYLE 

2, the breathing paused, — wavered; ceased. Fried- 
rich's Life-battle is fought out; instead of suffering 
and sore labour, here is now rest. Thursday morn- 
ing 17th August 1786, at the dark hour just named. 
On the 31st of May last, this King had reigned 46 
years. *He has lived,' counts Rodenbeck, '74 years, 
6 months and 24 days.' 

"His death seems very stern and lonely; — a man 
of such affectionate feelings, too; 'a man with more 
sensibility than other men T But so had his whole 
life been, stern and lonely; such the severe law laid 
on him. Nor was it inappropriate that he found his 
death in that poor Silesian Review; punctually do- 
ing, as usual, the work that had come in hand. Nor 
that he died now, rather than a few years later. In 
these final days of his, we have transiently noticed 
Arch-Cardinal de Rohan, Arch-Quack Cagliostro, 
and a most select Company of Persons and of Ac- 
tions, like an Elixir of the Nether World, miracu- 
lously emerging into daylight ; and all Paris, and by 
degrees all Europe, getting loud with the Diamond- 
Necklace History. And to eyes of deeper specula- 
tion, — World-Poet Goethe's, for instance, — it is be- 
coming evident that Chaos is again big. As has not 
she proved to be, and is still proving, in the most 



FREDERICK THE GREAT. 259 

teeming way ! Better for a Royal Hero, fallen old 
and feeble, to be hidden from such things. . . . 

"Friedrich was not buried at Sans-Souci, in the 
Tomb which he had built for himself ; why not, no- 
body clearly says. By his own express will, there 
was no embalming. Two Regiment-surgeons 
washed the Corpse, decently prepared it for inter- 
ment: *at 8 that same evening, Friedrich's Body, 
dressed in the uniform of the First Battalion of 
Guards, and laid in its coffin, was borne to Potsdam, 
in a hearse of eight horses, twelve Non-commis- 
sioned Officers of the Guard escorting. All Potsdam 
was in the streets; the Soldiers, of their own accord, 
formed rank, and followed the hearse; many a 
rugged face unable to restrain tears: for the rest, 
universal silence as of midnight, nothing audible 
among the people but here and there a sob, and the 
murmur, "Ach, der gute Kdnig!'* 

" *A11 next day, the Body lay in state in the Palace ; 
thousands crowding, from Berlin and the other en- 
virons, to see that face for the last time. Wasted, 
worn; but beautiful in death, with the thin gray hair 
parted into locks, and slightly powdered. And at 8 
in the evening' (Friday 18th), *he was borne to the 
Garnison-Kirche of Potsdam; and laid beside his 



260 CARLYLE 

Father, in the vault behind the Pulpit there/ — ^where 
the two Coffins are still to be seen. 

"I define him to myself as hitherto the Last of the 
Kings ; — when the Next will be, is a very long ques- 
tion ! But it seems to me as if Nations, probably all 
Nations, by and by, in their despair, — blinded, 
swallowed like Jonah, in such a whale's-belly of 
things brutish, waste, abominable (for is not An- 
archy, or the Rule of what is Baser over what is 
Nobler, the one life's-misery worth complaining of, 
and, in fact, the abomination of abominations, 
springing from and producing all others whatso- 
ever?) — as if the Nations universally, and England 
too if it hold on, may more and more bethink them- 
selves of such a Man and his Function and Perform- 
ance, with feelings far other than are possible at 
present. Meanwhile, all I had to say of him is fin- 
ished : that too, it seems, was a bit of work appointed 
to be done. Adieu, good readers ; bad also, adieu." 

To one who knows Carlyle's work in its entirety 
and recognizes in his Frederick the Great the last 
Herculean labor of an intellect that had now spent 
its best strength, that sentence of adieu to good 
and bad readers alike makes the fittest close for 
this little book. No comment can add anything to 



FREDERICK THE GREAT 261 

its note of quiet pathos, or to its clear-eyed vision 
of the transiency of much of our human effort, 
the futility of many of our human hopes. The 
weary giant has done his work at last, for better 
or worse, and may rest now, even as his toiling 
stonemason father had done before him. "Let me 
\vrite my books as he built his houses, and walk as 
blamelessly through this shadow world." That 
prayer of Carlyle's early manhood had been an- 
swered. 

Yet how many Americans, in this first quarter 
of the twentieth century, may fairly be said to know 
Carlyle's work in its entirety, or, for that matter, 
the entire work of any of the great Victorians? 
The drift of our age is against such robust and mas- 
culine effort to grapple with the total output of 
any first-rate mind. We read by scraps and patches. 
,We recall phrases, we retain impressionistic glimpses 
of characteristic attitudes and gestures, we hazard 
our facile American guess at the personality of a 
Thomas Carlyle, as we do at a hundred others of 
yesterday's distinguished names. This very book 
whose last page I am writing can not be expected 
to correct in the least degree this wide-spread tem- 
per of our age. But its intent, at any rate, has 



262 CARLYLE 

been to invite a new generation of hurried and pre- 
occupied Americans to look back steadily and wisely 
upon a great figure, and to study that figure in 
the light of Carlyle's own varied and stimulating 
and magnificent utterances. This book is not a sub- 
stitute for a thorough knowledge of Thomas Car- 
lyle. Yet it may help some readers to try to climb 
the mountain for themselves. The mountain i^ 
there — ^twenty-five matchless volumes of it! — and 
it may be climbed by any one possessing the strength 
and spirit of a mountaineer. There are shadows in 
its deep valleys, and they darken toward the eve- 
ning, as all earthly shadows do ; but one climbs this 
mountain not so much to watch the lengthening 
shadows as to see a sunrise lighting an illimitable 
world. 



THE END 



INDEX 



INDEX 

Aitken, Margaret, 5, 26. 
Annan, 6, 9. 
Annandale, 57. 

Boswell, James, 82. 

Brown, Sir James Crichton, 35. 

Browning, Robert, 25, 83. 

Buller family, 9, 25. 

Burke, Edmund, 191. 

Burns, Robert, 16. 

Byron, Lord, 69. 

Carlyle, Alexander, 26, 27, 33, 34. 

Carlyle, Thomis*: father, 3, 6; death 27; education, 8; life in 
^ Annan, 6, 9; Annandale, 57 'Chelsea 17, 26; Craigen- 
puttoch, 13, 14, 15. 17; Ecclefechan, 1, Sj Kirkaldy 9 
London, 17; marriage, 12; manner of writing, 40, 171, 
mother, 5; solitude, 24; theory of writing 60. 

WORKS REFERRED TO 

Biography, 16, 71; Burns, 68, 69; Characteristics, 84, 85, 
S7', Chartism, 21, 83, 162-169; Count Caghostro 14; 
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 21 ; Cromwell, ^l, 4U, 
42, 46, 185, 200-222; The Diamond ^^f^^«if> /^ 'olc 
Early Letters, 8; Frederick the Great 15 22 48, 245- 
262; French Revolution, 15, 21, 40, 41, 46, 58, 121-161, 
201; German Literature, 15, 61; Heroes and Hero- 
Worship, 21, 63, 83, 170-184; History, 16 70; Later-Day 
Pamphlets, 21, 54, 83, 223-229; Miscellanies, 13; Fa^f 

and Present, 21, 54, 185-199; ^^^*"»f^^y/V'oT ?i' J> 
34, 51, 53, 103 ; Sartor Resartus, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 21, 25, 64 
67 68, 83, 89-120, 122; Schiller, 10, ^^x.^\^^^'9nsof the 
Times, 84, BS; Sterling, 22, 24, 230-240; Wilhelm 
Meister, 6, 20, 60; Wotton Reinfred, 90. 

Chelsea, 17, 26. 

Coleridge, Samuel, 231-241. 

Craigenputtoch, 13, 14, 15, 17. 

265 



266 INDEX 

De Quincey, Thomas, 53. 
Dickens, Charles, 36, 49, 57, 83. 
Diderot, Denis, 49. 
Disraeli, Isaac, 23, 27. 
Don Quixote, 13. 

Ecclefechan, 1, 8. 

Edinburgh, 13. 

Edinburgh Encyclopcrdia, 9. 

Edinburgh Review, 68. 

Edinburgh University, 6, 8, 9, 23. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 7, 13, 21, 23, 24, 42, 223. 

Forster, John, 25, 30. 

Eraser's Magazine, 15, 82. 

Froude, J. A., 12, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 123, 203, 223. 

Garnett, Richard, 20. 
Gilchrists, Th4 24. 
Goethe, 12, 20,^5, 61, 62. 

Hume, David, 171. 
Hunts, The, 24. 

Irving, Edward, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 24, 31, 

Jeffrey, Francis, 13, 31, 223. 
Johnson, Samuel, 16, 36. 

Kingsley, Charles, 164. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 203. 
Kirkaldy, 9. 

Lehman, B. H., 172. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 167. 
Lockhart, John, 163. 
London, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23. 

London Review, 162. 

London and Westminster Review, 163. 

Lowell, James Russell, 167. 

Marvell, Andrew, 25. 

Mazzini, 25, 169. 

Mill, John Stuart, 21, 24, 37, 41, 162, 163, 167, 193, 200, 225. 



INDEX 267 



New Princeton Review, 34. 
Newman, John Henry, 36. 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 34. 
Novalis, 61. 

Quarterly Review, The, 163. 

Richter, Jean Paul, 57, 61. 
Ruskin, John, 25, 2)6, 2>7. 

Schiller, Friedrich, 61. 

Shaw, W. A., 201. 

Southey, Robert, 31, 51. 

Sterling, John, 42. 

Swift, Jonathan, 25, 89, 90, 228. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 9, 20, 52, 83, 223. 
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 9, 25, Z6, 
Tolstoi, Leo, 57, 83. 

Welsh, Jane, 12, 13, 19, 23, ZZ. 
Westminster Review, 200. 
Whistler, James, 24. 
Whitman, Walt, 9, 27, 57. 
Wordsworth, William, 31, 223. 






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